  Covert communications hide the transmission of a message from a watchful
adversary while ensuring a certain decoding performance at the receiver. In
this work, a wireless communication system under fading channels is considered
where covertness is achieved by using a full-duplex (FD) receiver. More
precisely, the receiver of covert information generates artificial noise with a
varying power causing uncertainty at the adversary, Willie, regarding the
statistics of the received signals. Given that Willie's optimal detector is a
threshold test on the received power, we derive a closed-form expression for
the optimal detection performance of Willie averaged over the fading channel
realizations. Furthermore, we provide guidelines for the optimal choice of
artificial noise power range, and the optimal transmission probability of
covert information to maximize the detection errors at Willie. Our analysis
shows that the transmission of artificial noise, although causes
self-interference, provides the opportunity of achieving covertness but its
transmit power levels need to be managed carefully. We also demonstrate that
the prior transmission probability of 0.5 is not always the best choice for
achieving the maximum possible covertness, when the covert transmission
probability and artificial noise power can be jointly optimized.
