Adversarial Defense Embedded Waveform Design for Reliable Communication in the Physical Layer

• Published in: IEEE internet of things journal Vol. 11; no. 10; pp. 18136 - 18153
• Main Authors: Qi, Peihan, Meng, Yongchao, Zheng, Shilian, Zhou, Xiaoyu, Cheng, Nan, Li, Zan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 15.05.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adversarial defense; Amplitudes; Bit error rate; Communication; Communication system security; Communications systems; Controllability; Cybersecurity; Defense; Demodulation; Eavesdropping; Generative adversarial networks; generative adversarial networks (GANs); Internet of Things; Perturbation; Physical layer; physical-layer security (PLS); Reliability; Reliability engineering; reliable communication; Security; waveform design; Waveforms; Wireless communication; Wireless communications
• ISSN: 2327-4662; 2327-4662
• DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2024.3361447

Due to the openness of wireless channels, wireless communication is vulnerable to be eavesdropped, which results in confidential information leakage. Physical-layer security (PLS) technology provides a new way to solve this hidden danger of Internet of Things system. However, traditional PLS methods are often restricted by limited communication resources and unknown instantaneous channel state information of eavesdroppers, which makes it challenging to strike a balance between security and reliability in the communication system. Therefore, an adversarial defense embedded waveform design (ADEWD) method for physical-layer reliable communication (PLRC) is proposed in this article. First, we use generative adversarial networks to generate amplitude controllable adversarial perturbation, and then superimpose it with original communication signal to form an adversarial signal. At the same time, we also design a demodulation network based on the modulation type of legitimate users to constrain the amplitude of the generated perturbations, to reduce the bit error rate (BER) loss after demodulation of the adversarial signal. With this waveform design, the adversarial signal not only enables reliable communication between legitimate users, but also utilizes embedded defense traps to prevent eavesdroppers from recognizing legitimate users. The experimental results demonstrate that our ADEWD method for PLRC has stronger defense capability and lower BER in both white-box and black-box scenarios, which reflects the defense robustness and communication reliability of the proposed waveform design method.