Keyless Covert Communication Over Quantum MACs with General Message Sets
2026-07-09 • Information Theory
Information Theory
AI summaryⓘ
The authors explore how to send secret classical messages without being detected, using quantum channels where multiple senders communicate at once. They prove it's possible to send data covertly at a positive rate and detail the limits of such communication for different types of quantum channels. They also show that their results include previous known cases as special examples. Additionally, they provide practical examples with helpers in several channel settings, including quantum and classical channels, demonstrating achievable secret communication rates. This work is the first to prove positive covert data rates for both quantum and classical multiple-access channels.
Covert communicationQuantum multiple-access channelClassical-quantum channelMessage setsCovert capacityDeterministic encodingFinite-dimensional quantum channelClassical Gaussian channelBosonic channelOne-shot achievable rates
Authors
Hassan ZivariFard, Xiaodong Wang
Abstract
We study covert classical communication over quantum multiple-access channels (MACs) with general message sets. Specifically, we consider a fully quantum MAC with arbitrary message sets and an arbitrary number of transmitters. We demonstrate the feasibility of achieving a positive covert rate over this channel and establish general one-shot and asymptotic achievable rate regions. For classical-quantum MACs with general message sets, we establish the covert capacity, when the transmitters are restricted to deterministic encoding. Our result recovers, as a special case, known results for classical communication over classical MACs with general message sets, covert communication of a classical message over a classical channel with two transmitters, and classical communication over quantum MACs. We provide three examples of MACs to which our results can be applied, either directly or indirectly, to achieve positive covert rates. Specifically, we first study covert communication over a finite-dimensional MAC with a helper. We then analyze a classical Gaussian MAC with a helper and derive its covert capacity. Finally, we extend the analysis to a single-mode bosonic MAC with a helper and show that positive covert rates can also be achieved in this setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to achieve positive-rate covert communication over both classical and quantum MACs.