Secret Agent Radio: Covert Communication through Dirty Constellations

In this paper we propose a novel approach to implement high capacity, covert channel by encoding covert information in the physical layer of common wireless communication protocols. We call our technique Dirty Constellation because we hide the covert messages within a “dirty” constellation that mimics noise commonly imposed by hardware imperfections and channel conditions. The cover traffic in this method is the baseband modulation constellation. We leverage the variability in the wireless channel and hardware conditions to encode the covert channel. Packet sharing techniques and pre-distortion of the modulated symbols of a decoy packet allows the transmission of a secondary covert message while making it statistically undetectable to an adversary. We demonstrate the technique by implementing it in hardware, on top of an 802.11a/g PHY layer, using a software defined radio and analyze the undetectability of the scheme through a variety of common radio measurements and statistical tests.