Animal mimicry for covert communication with arbitrary output distribution: beyond the assumption of ignorance

The paper describes a new method of embedding human communication in acoustic sequences mimicking animal communication. This is done to ensure a low probability of detection (LPD) transfer of covert messages. The proposed scheme mimics not only individual sounds, but also the imitated species’ communication structure. This paper presents a step forward in animal communication mimicry - from pure vocal imitation without regard for the plausibility of communication’s structure, through Zipf’s law-preserving scheme, to the mimicry of a known communication structure. Unlike previous methods, the updated scheme does not rely on third parties’ ignorance of the imitated species’ communication structure beyond Zipf’s law - instead, the new method enables one to encode information in a known zeroth-order Markov model. The paper describes a method of encoding an arbitrary message in a syntactically plausible, species-specific sequence of animal sounds through evolutionary means. A comparison with the previous iteration of the method is also presented.