Covert Cycle Stealing in a Single FIFO Server

Consider a setting where Willie generates a Poisson stream of jobs and routes them to a single server that follows the first-in first-out discipline. Suppose there is an adversary Alice, who desires to receive service without being detected. We ask the question: What is the number of jobs that she can receive covertly, i.e., without being detected by Willie? In the case where both Willie and Alice jobs have exponential service times with respective rates μ1 and μ2, we demonstrate a phase-transition when Alice adopts the strategy of inserting a single job probabilistically when the server idles: over n busy periods, she can achieve a covert throughput, measured by the expected number of jobs covertly inserted, of O(√ n) when μ1 < 2 μ2, O(√ n log n) when μ1 = 2μ2, and O(nμ2/μ1) when μ1 > 2μ2. When both Willie and Alice jobs have general service times, we establish an upper bound for the number of jobs Alice can execute covertly. This bound is related to the Fisher information. More general insertion policies are also discussed.