Efficient Covert Communication With Ambient OFDM WiFi Backscatter

Yimeng Huang, Kailai Yan, Chenhong Cao, Longzhi Yuan, Yuguang Fang, Amiya Nayak, Wei Gong

Abstract: Information security is a non-negligible issue for wireless transmission. Covert communication provides high security by concealing the transmitted signals within environmental noise. However, existing solutions suffer from low transmission efficiency. Ambient backscatter, concealing data within ubiquitous ambient signals, provides a promising way to achieve high-efficiency covert communication. In this paper, we propose CoScatter, an efficient covert transmission system based on OFDM WiFi backscatter. Current studies rely on redundant modulation, resulting in low throughput. This paper is to increase throughput and shorten transmission time, thereby reducing exposure risk. This is the first work to realize single-sample level demodulation, efficiently eliminating the redundancy, increasing the throughput, and reducing the transmission time. We discover that the main obstacles are the additional phase offsets introduced by three independent wireless channels in backscatter systems. Based on this, we design a new backscatter channel equalization procedure to remove the channel influences while preserving all the covert information embedded by the tag, realizing an efficient covert transmission. Evaluation results show that Coscatter achieves a throughput exceeding 15.7 Mbps, which is around 64x of that of RapidRider, and 16x of that of Tscatter. Consequently, the exposure risk of CoScatter is reduced to 1/64 of that of RapidRider and 1/16 of that of Tscatter.

External IDs:doi:10.1109/jsac.2025.3639454