Performance Analysis of Channel-Coding-Based Covert Channels in Physical-Layer Wireless Communications

Ning Xie

¹Control and Network Foundation Laboratory, Department of Strategic and Advanced Interdisciplinary Research, Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen 518107, China.

²School of Intelligent Science and Engineering, Qinghai Minzu University, Xining 810007, Qinghai, China

³State Key Laboratory of Radio Frequency Heterogeneous Integration and the Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China

*Corresponding author

Channel-coding-based covert channels in physical-layer wireless communications enable hidden transmission by embedding covert bits into coded cover signals after channel coding. While existing studies mainly focus on covert-channel construction, the corresponding performance limits remain insufficiently characterized. This paper analyzes such covert channels from the two complementary viewpoints of robustness and security. For robustness, a BER-based effective covert-rate metric is adopted and specialized to the considered channel-coding-based covert embedding framework, and the effects of the hidden payload per cover-code codeword, the error-correction capabilities of the cover and hidden codes, the modulation order, the fading severity, and the coding structure are characterized. For security, two passive statistical attack scenarios, based on corrected-error distributions across codeword positions and embedding-induced Bit Error Rate (BER) variation, are analyzed, and the corresponding security capacities are derived. The results show that the achievable covert capacity is nonincreasing with the number of hidden coded bits embedded in each cover-code codeword and enlarges with the error-correction capability of the cover code. They further show that codeword-wide uniform random embedding minimizes the systematic positional footprint under the corrected-error-statistics attack scenario, and that positive overall security capacity is achievable only when the statistical constraints of both attack scenarios are simultaneously satisfied. Numerical results validate the analysis and demonstrate that block-coded systems are markedly more suitable than convolutional-coded systems under the considered bit-flip embedding rule, and that viable covert transmission can arise in both low- and high-SNR regimes.

Covert channel, channel coding, performance analysis, robustness, security

Haijun Tan and Ning Xie (2026). Performance Analysis of Channel-Coding-Based Covert Channels in Physical-Layer Wireless Communications. Journal of Networking and Network Applications, Volume 6, Issue 2, pp. 87–96. https://doi.org/10.33969/J-NaNA.2026.060205.

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