Adversarial attacks and defenses for digital communication signals identification

Abstract

As modern communication technology advances apace, the digital communication signals identification plays an important role in cognitive radio networks, the communication monitoring and management systems. AI has become a promising solution to this problem due to its powerful modeling capability, which has become a consensus in academia and industry. However, because of the data-dependence and inexplicability of AI models and the openness of electromagnetic space, the physical layer digital communication signals identification model is threatened by adversarial attacks. Adversarial examples pose a common threat to AI models, where well-designed and slight perturbations added to input data can cause wrong results. Therefore, the security of AI models for the digital communication signals identification is the premise of its efficient and credible applications. In this paper, we first launch adversarial attacks on the end-to-end AI model for automatic modulation classification, and then we explain and present three defense mechanisms based on the adversarial principle. Next we present more detailed adversarial indicators to evaluate attack and defense behavior. Finally, a demonstration verification system is developed to show that the adversarial attack is a real threat to the digital communication signals identification model, which should be paid more attention in future research.

Keywords

• Digital communication signals identification
• AI model
• Adversarial attacks
• Adversarial defenses
• Adversarial indicators