Techniques for detecting and characterising covert communication signals

A rapidly emerging threat in communications security (COMSEC) is the use of very wideband covert signals such as direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS). Conventional intercept receivers based on second order (variance) signal processing are severely limited in this respect. However, the cyclostationary property of modulated DS/SS leads to a simple correlation receiver and further research has shown that higher order statistical processing can detect DS/SS and even identify the code signatures in a relatively hostile environment