The Transmitter Trojan Channel: Achievable Rates and Error Exponents
Abstract
Experiments have shown that modifications in communication hardware can enable unauthorized exfiltration of data from transmitters. We study the resulting Transmitter Trojan channel, in which a malicious encoder embedded within a legitimate transmitter perturbs the transmitted codeword on a symbol-by-symbol basis. The model reflects the limited footprint, delay, and computational complexity available to such hardware modifications. We derive achievable rogue message rate and achievable rates for the legitimate message under the mismatch induced by the Trojan. We also analyze decoding error exponents for the legitimate and rogue receivers, including operational exponent lower bounds obtained through channel-resolvability transfer arguments. Finally, we study Trojan detection at the legitimate receiver under different levels of statistical knowledge, including likelihood-ratio detection when the ensemble-averaged induced channel is known and goodness-of-fit detection when only the nominal channel is known. The resulting detection error exponents, together with the achievable rate and decoding error exponents, quantify tradeoffs among rogue message rate, legitimate message rate, decoding reliability, and Trojan detectability. We specialize the analysis to the binary symmetric channel and the additive white Gaussian noise channel, and illustrate the resulting tradeoffs numerically.
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BibTeX
@misc{farahnakghazani2026transmitter,
title = {{The Transmitter Trojan Channel: Achievable Rates and Error Exponents}},
author = {Maryam Farahnak-Ghazani and Aria Nosratinia},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.32074},
eprint = {2609.32074},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32074},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Transmitter Trojan Channel: Achievable Rates and Error Exponents
AU - Maryam Farahnak-Ghazani
AU - Aria Nosratinia
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/25
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.32074
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32074
AB - Experiments have shown that modifications in communication hardware can enable unauthorized exfiltration of data from transmitters. We study the resulting Transmitter Trojan channel, in which a malicious encoder embedded within a legitimate transmitter perturbs the transmitted codeword on a symbol-by-symbol basis. The model reflects the limited footprint, delay, and computational complexity available to such hardware modifications. We derive achievable rogue message rate and achievable rates for the legitimate message under the mismatch induced by the Trojan. We also analyze decoding error exponents for the legitimate and rogue receivers, including operational exponent lower bounds obtained through channel-resolvability transfer arguments. Finally, we study Trojan detection at the legitimate receiver under different levels of statistical knowledge, including likelihood-ratio detection when the ensemble-averaged induced channel is known and goodness-of-fit detection when only the nominal channel is known. The resulting detection error exponents, together with the achievable rate and decoding error exponents, quantify tradeoffs among rogue message rate, legitimate message rate, decoding reliability, and Trojan detectability. We specialize the analysis to the binary symmetric channel and the additive white Gaussian noise channel, and illustrate the resulting tradeoffs numerically.
ER -