AbstractSecure transmission of information over hostile wireless environments is desired by both military and civilian parties. Direct‐sequence spread‐spectrum (DS‐SS) is such a covert technique resistant to interference, interception, and multipath fading. Identifying spread‐spectrum signals or cracking DS‐SS systems by an unintended receiver (or eavesdropper) withouta prioriknowledge is a challenging problem. To address this problem, we first search for the start position of data symbols in the spread signal (for symbol synchronization); our method is based on maximizing the spectral norm of a sample covariance matrix, which achieves smaller estimation error than the existing method of maximizing the Frobenius norm. After synchronization, we remove a spread sequence by a cross‐correlation based method, and identify the spread sequence by a matched filter. The proposed identification method is less expensive and more accurate than the existing methods. We also propose a zigzag searching method to identify a generator polynomial that reduces memory requirement and is capable of correcting polarity errors existing in the previous methods. In addition, we analyze the bit error performance of our proposed method. The simulation results agree well with our analytical results, indicating the accuracy of our analysis in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. By simulation, we also demonstrate the performance improvement of our proposed schemes over the existing methods. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.