Frequency-based Automated Modulation Classification in the Presence of Adversaries
This addresses the problem of adversarial interference in wireless communication systems for improved spectrum efficiency, representing a domain-specific incremental advance.
The paper tackles the vulnerability of deep learning-based automatic modulation classification to transferable adversarial attacks by proposing a receiver architecture that uses frequency-domain features, achieving over 30% improvement for RNNs and over 50% for CNNs under attack and over 99% accuracy without attacks.
Automatic modulation classification (AMC) aims to improve the efficiency of crowded radio spectrums by automatically predicting the modulation constellation of wireless RF signals. Recent work has demonstrated the ability of deep learning to achieve robust AMC performance using raw in-phase and quadrature (IQ) time samples. Yet, deep learning models are highly susceptible to adversarial interference, which cause intelligent prediction models to misclassify received samples with high confidence. Furthermore, adversarial interference is often transferable, allowing an adversary to attack multiple deep learning models with a single perturbation crafted for a particular classification network. In this work, we present a novel receiver architecture consisting of deep learning models capable of withstanding transferable adversarial interference. Specifically, we show that adversarial attacks crafted to fool models trained on time-domain features are not easily transferable to models trained using frequency-domain features. In this capacity, we demonstrate classification performance improvements greater than 30% on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and greater than 50% on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We further demonstrate our frequency feature-based classification models to achieve accuracies greater than 99% in the absence of attacks.