Secret key expansion from covert communication

Abstract: Covert communication allows us to transmit messages in such a way that it is not possible to detect that the communication is occurring. This provides protection in situations where knowledge that people are talking to each other may be incriminating to them. In this work, we study how covert communication can be used for a different purpose: secret key expansion. First, we show that any message transmitted in a secure covert protocol is also secret and therefore unknown to an adversary. We then propose a protocol that uses covert communication where the amount of key consumed in the protocol is smaller than the transmitted key, thus leading to secure secret key expansion. We derive precise conditions showing that secret key expansion from covert communication is possible when there are sufficiently low levels of noise for a given security level. We conclude by examining how secret key expansion from covert communication can be performed in a computational security model.