GAN-Empowered Parasitic Covert Communication: Data Privacy in Next-Generation Networks

The widespread integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in next-generation communication networks poses a serious threat to data privacy while achieving advanced signal processing. Eavesdroppers can use AI-based analysis to detect and reconstruct transmitted signals, leading to serious leakage of confidential information. In order to protect data privacy at the physical layer, we redefine covert communication as an active data protection mechanism. We propose a new parasitic covert communication framework in which communication signals are embedded into dynamically generated interference by generative adversarial networks (GANs). This method is implemented by our CDGUBSS (complex double generator unsupervised blind source separation) system. The system is explicitly designed to prevent unauthorized AI-based strategies from analyzing and compromising signals. For the intended recipient, the pre-trained generator acts as a trusted key and can perfectly recover the original data. Extensive experiments have shown that our framework achieves powerful covert communication, and more importantly, it provides strong defense against data reconstruction attacks, ensuring excellent data privacy in next-generation wireless systems.