Entanglement-Assisted Covert Communication via Qubit Depolarizing Channels

Abstract: We consider entanglement-assisted communication over the qubit depolarizing channel under the security requirement of covert communication, where not only the information is kept secret, but the transmission itself must be concealed from detection by an adversary. Previous work showed that $O(\sqrt{n})$ information bits can be reliably and covertly transmitted in $n$ channel uses without entanglement assistance. However, Gagatsos et al. (2020) showed that entanglement assistance can increase this scaling to $O(\sqrt{n}\log(n))$ for continuous-variable bosonic channels. Here, we present a finite-dimensional parallel, and show that $O(\sqrt{n}\log(n))$ covert bits can be transmitted reliably over $n$ uses of a qubit depolarizing channel. The coding scheme employs "weakly" entangled states such that their squared amplitude scales as $O(1/\sqrt{n})$.