Title:  Information-Theoretically Covert Communications under Variational Distance Constraint: Limits and Algorithms

Committee: 

Dr. Bloch, Advisor

Dr. Barry, Chair

Dr. Xie

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to bridge the gap between the theoretical study of covert capacity and the practical design of provably covert systems. Covert communications require the legitimate parties in a communication network to establish reliable transmission and information exchange without being detected by malicious adversaries. Although the covert throughput has been shown to grow in the square root of the block length, the constant behind the square root, which plays the role of the covert capacity, exhibits a strong dependency on how the covertness is measured. The choice of the covertness metric constitutes the motivating thread of the proposed research.