telecommunications Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...

and

tradecraft Tradecraft, within the intelligence community, refers to the techniques, methods, and technologies used in modern espionage (spying) and generally as part of the activity of intelligence assessment. This includes general topics or techniques ...

, cover is the technique of concealing or altering the characteristics of communications patterns for the purpose of denying an unauthorized receiver

information Information is an Abstraction, abstract concept that refers to something which has the power Communication, to inform. At the most fundamental level, it pertains to the Interpretation (philosophy), interpretation (perhaps Interpretation (log ...

that would be of value. The purpose of cover is not to make the communication secure, but to make it look like noise, rendering it uninteresting and not worth analysis. Even if an attacker recognizes the communication as interesting, cover makes

traffic analysis Traffic analysis is the process of intercepting and examining messages in order to deduce information from patterns in communication. It can be performed even when the messages are encrypted. In general, the greater the number of messages observ ...

more difficult since he must crack the cover before he can find out to whom it is addressed. Usually, the covered communication is also

encrypted In cryptography, encryption (more specifically, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plain ...

. In this way, enemies have no idea you sent a message; friends know you sent a message, but don't know what you said; the intended recipient knows what you said. Technically, cover sometimes refers to the specific process of modulo two additions of a

pseudorandom A pseudorandom sequence of numbers is one that appears to be statistically random, despite having been produced by a completely deterministic and repeatable process. Pseudorandom number generators are often used in computer programming, as tradi ...

bit stream A bitstream (or bit stream), also known as binary sequence, is a sequence of bits. A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may ...

generated by a

cryptographic Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More gen ...

device with bits from the control

message A message is a unit of communication that conveys information from a sender to a receiver. It can be transmitted through various forms, such as spoken or written words, signals, or electronic data, and can range from simple instructions to co ...

. Source: from

Federal Standard 1037C Federal Standard 1037C, titled Telecommunications: Glossary of Telecommunication Terms, is a United States Federal Standard issued by the General Services Administration pursuant to the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, ...

and from

MIL-STD-188 MIL-STD-188 is a series of U.S. military standards relating to telecommunications. Purpose Faced with "past technical deficiencies in telecommunications systems and equipment and software…that were traced to basic inadequacies in the appl ...

References

Cryptography {{Crypto-stub es:cobertura