Adversarial Filters for Secure Modulation Classification

Classification (MC) is the problem of classifying the modulation format of a wireless signal. In the wireless communications pipeline, MC is the first operation performed on the received signal and is critical for reliable decoding. This paper considers the problem of secure MC, where a transmitter (Alice) wants to maximize MC accuracy at a legitimate receiver (Bob) while minimizing MC accuracy at an eavesdropper (Eve). This work introduces novel adversarial learning techniques for secure MC. We present adversarial filters in which Alice uses a carefully designed adversarial filter to mask the transmitted signal, that can maximize MC accuracy at Bob while minimizing MC accuracy at Eve. We present two filtering-based algorithms, namely gradient ascent filter (GAF), and a fast gradient filter method (FGFM), with varying levels of complexity. Our proposed adversarial filtering-based approaches significantly outperform additive adversarial perturbations (used in the traditional machine-learning (ML) community and other prior works on secure MC) and have several other desirable properties. In particular, GAF and FGFM algorithms are a) computational efficient (allow fast decoding at Bob), b) power-efficient (do not require excessive transmit power at Alice); and c) SNR efficient (i.e., perform well even at low SNR values at Bob).