A Risk-Aware Framework for Covert Quantum Communication under Stochastic Channel Uncertainty
Summarize this article with:
Quantum Physics arXiv:2605.18928 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 18 May 2026] Title:A Risk-Aware Framework for Covert Quantum Communication under Stochastic Channel Uncertainty Authors:Abbas Arghavani, Shahid Raza, Maryam Amiri, Alessandro Papadopoulos View a PDF of the paper titled A Risk-Aware Framework for Covert Quantum Communication under Stochastic Channel Uncertainty, by Abbas Arghavani and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Covert quantum communication (CQC) seeks to hide not only message content but also the existence of communication. Existing CQC models usually assume deterministic or worst-case channel conditions, which are difficult to justify in realistic free-space optical and quantum links affected by turbulence, fluctuating background radiance, and stochastic detector noise. We propose a stochastic risk-aware optimization framework for CQC under uncertain physical-layer conditions. By modeling transmissivity and background noise as random variables, we express covertness and reliability guarantees through chance constraints with explicit outage budgets $\epsilon_{\text{cov}}$ and $\epsilon_{\text{rel}}$. This recasts CQC design as a risk-calibrated resource-allocation problem balancing throughput, covertness, reliability, and communication privacy. We derive quantile-based reformulations of the outage constraints, characterize feasible operating regions under stochastic uncertainty, and introduce a complementary risk-adjusted utility formulation to expose throughput-risk trade-offs. The analysis reveals that modest relaxations in acceptable covertness-outage risk can yield large throughput gains, while aggressive optimization may break covertness outside sparse-transmission regimes. Monte Carlo results under log-normal fading and stochastic thermal noise show that the framework expands feasible operating regions, improves covert throughput by more than an order of magnitude, and identifies degradation boundaries beyond which covert operation becomes unreliable. These results move CQC closer to realistic secure quantum networking for free-space, satellite, and low-probability-of-detection applications. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Signal Processing (eess.SP) Cite as: arXiv:2605.18928 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2605.18928v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.18928 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Abbas Arghavani [view email] [v1] Mon, 18 May 2026 13:38:36 UTC (885 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled A Risk-Aware Framework for Covert Quantum Communication under Stochastic Channel Uncertainty, by Abbas Arghavani and 3 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CR eess eess.SP References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)