Covert Quantum Communication

Abstract: We extend covert communication to the quantum regime by showing that covert quantum communication is possible over optical channels with noise arising either from the environment or from the sender's lab. In particular, we show that sequences of qubits can be transmitted covertly by using both a single photon and a coherent state encoding. We study the possibility of performing covert quantum key distribution and show that positive key rates and covertness can be achieved simultaneously. Covert communication requires a secret key between sender and receiver, which raises the problem of how this key can be regenerated covertly. We show that covert QKD consumes more key than it can generate and propose instead a hybrid protocol for covert key regeneration that uses pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) together with covert QKD to regenerate secret keys. The security of the new key is guaranteed by QKD while the security of the covert communication is at least as strong as the security of the PRNG.