Achievability of Covert Quantum Communication

Abstract: We explore covert communication of qubits over an arbitrary quantum channel. Covert communication conceals the transmissions in the channel noise, ensuring that an adversary is unable to detect their presence. We show the achievability of a $\textit{square root law}$ (SRL) for quantum covert communication similar to that for classical: $M(n)\propto\sqrt{n}$ qubits can be transmitted covertly and reliably over $n$ uses of a general quantum channel. We lower bound $M(n)$ with and without assistance from a two-way covert classical channel. In the former case, we quantify the number of classical covert bits sufficient for our protocol.