In the context of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, ensuring secure and covert wireless communication remains a critical challenge, especially when using energy harvesting relays. Moreover, the analysis of hardware impairments is a pivotal practical aspect in the evaluation of IoT communication networks. This paper investigates four scenarios to address security and covert communication. In the first scenario, the focus is on guaranteeing the security in the presence of hardware impairments. In this case, the external jammer transmits interference signals toward both the relay and Bob to prevent information leakage from the untrusted relay. However, in this scenario, since the state of the untrusted relay is always superior to that of Bob, security cannot be guaranteed under any network parameters. Accordingly, in the second scenario, to tackle this problem, a receiver equipped with the capability to transmit jamming signals (receiver jammer) is proposed, aiming to protect the communication against potential information leakage from the untrusted relay. In the third and fourth scenarios, the relay is considered a trusted node, and warden (Willie) is introduced into the system. Here, the external jammer plays a crucial role when transmitting interference signals simultaneously toward Bob, relay, and Willie to ensure communication security. This scenario incorporates covert communication designed to counter threats from Willie’s detection. Covert communication in these two scenarios is analyzed under the following two conditions: 1) When Willie has Channel State Information (CSI); 2) When Willie lacks CSI, in which case he equips himself with multiple antennas. Simulation results show that the proposed power allocation can enhance secure and covert communications, even in the presence of hardware impairments and a multi-antenna Willie. Moreover, it is shown that when Willie has CSI, the performance of covert communication is severely reduced.

As the Internet of Things increasingly extends into underwater monitoring and intelligent marine systems, the demand for secure and covert communication frameworks has grown significantly. In this context, mixed RF–UOWC networks emerge as a promising architecture for reliable and low-detectability data exchange in challenging aquatic environments. Unlike existing covert communication studies that mainly focus on single communication links, this work investigates covert transmission in a mixed RF–UOWC network incorporating trusted DF/AF relays and untrusted AF relays. Each relay is equipped with energy harvesting and jamming capabilities, while practical hardware impairments and near-field effects are explicitly taken into account. Closed-form expressions for Willie’s false alarm and missed detection probabilities are derived under these new scenarios. Moreover, to analyze the proposed system model, optimization problems are formulated with the objective of maximizing the achievable covert transmission rate. An efficient iterative algorithm is developed to solve the resulting problems and analyze the impact of relay processing strategies, energy harvesting, and hardware impairments on covert performance. Numerical results provide useful insights into the design of covert communication schemes for mixed RF–UOWC networks in IoT-enabled underwater environments.

In practice, Internet of Things (IoT) applications may face two different hostile attacks, i.e., overhearing the broadcasted data and detecting the presence of data communication. Previous works have assumed that only one of these attacks is present in the network and have addressed these attacks separately. In this article, we investigate the security of a simple but practical IoT-based point-to-point communication which is facing with the above-mentioned two attacks under some realistic assumptions. In other words, we aim to protect the data against two adversary nodes, namely Eve (who tries to capture the broadcasted data) and warden Willie (who tries to detect the presence of data communication between legitimate nodes). To tackle these attacks, we jointly employ the information-theoretic security and covert communication techniques. To hide information from Willies, we force the source to transmit its message in the selected time slot and the multiple-antennas cooperative jammer to inject jamming during all time slots contentiously which leads to deceive Eves and Willies jointly. To enhance the performance of this security design, we formulate an optimization problem, with the goal of maximizing the secrecy rate subject to power constraints at the source and jammer, while satisfying a covert communication requirement. Since the mentioned optimization problem is nonconvex, we propose an algorithm to solve it. Then, to obtain further insights, we extend our proposed system model to noncolluding and colluding Willies. Next, we study a practical communication scenario, where the source has uncertainty about Willie’s location and knows the channel state information (CSI) of Eves imperfectly. Our numerical results highlight that a more accurate estimation of Willie’s location has a more positive efficacy on the secrecy performance compared to the case with more accuracy of Eves’ CSI estimation.

In this article, we investigate joint information-theoretic secrecy and covert communication in a single-input-multioutput (SIMO) system where a transmitter (Alice) is communicating with two legitimate users (Bob and Carol). We consider that an untrusted user and a warden node are also present in the network attempting to attack the secure and covert communications to Bob and Carol, respectively. Specifically, Bob requires secure communications such that his messages from Alice are not decoded by the untrusted user, while Carol requires covert communications such that her messages from Alice are not detected by the warden. To do so, we consider that Alice transmits Carol's messages during selected time slots to hide them from the warden while also transmitting Bob's messages in each time slot contentiously. We formulate an optimization problem with the aim of maximizing the average rate subject to a covert communication requirement and a secure communications constraint. Since the proposed optimization problem is nonconvex, we utilize successive convex approximation to obtain a tractable solution. Moreover, we extend our proposed system model to multiple antenna Alice scenario and find beamforming vectors so that the average sum rate is maximized. Furthermore, we consider practical assumptions that Alice has imperfect knowledge of the warden's location and imperfect channel state information (CSI) of Bob and Carol. Our numerical examples highlight that the imperfect CSI at Carol has a more detrimental impact on the average rate compared to imperfect CSI at Bob.

In this paper, we address the problem of joint covert communication and secure transmission in untrusted relaying networks when multiple wardens exist in the network. We first consider a system model consisting of one source, one untrusted amplify-and-forward relay, one destination, and one warden. For covert communications, our aim is to prevent the warden from detecting the presence of communications via the source-relay-destination link. For secure transmission, our aim is to prevent the untrusted relay from decoding the source signal. To satisfy these requirements, we propose that the destination and the source inject jamming signals during the source-to-relay and relay-to-destination transmission phases, respectively. For the considered system model, we propose a power allocation strategy to maximize the secrecy rate and satisfy the covert requirements in both of the phases. Given that the proposed optimization problem is non-convex, we employ the successive convex approximation (SCA) approach to derive a tractable solution. To obtain further insights, we generalize our analytical results to consider multiple untrusted relays and multiple wardens. We focus on two scenarios of non-colluding and colluding wardens. Our results highlight that as the number of relays increases, the achievable secrecy rate increases while the average detection error probability decreases. This is a novel observation of a fundamental trade-off between covert requirement and secrecy performance.