Reliable Deniable Communication: Hiding Messages in Noise

Abstract

A transmitter Alice may wish to reliably transmit a message to a receiver Bob over a binary symmetric channel (BSC), while simultaneously ensuring that her transmission is deniable from an eavesdropper Willie. That is, if Willie listening to Alice’s transmissions over a “significantly noisier ” BSC than the one to Bob, he should be unable to estimate even whether Alice is transmitting. Even when Alice’s (potential) communication scheme is publicly known to Willie (with no common randomness between Alice and Bob), we prove that over n channel uses Alice can transmit a message of length O(√n) bits to Bob, deniably from Willie. We also prove information-theoretically order-optimality of our results. I.