Generative adversarial network for wireless signal spoofing

Abstract

The paper presents a novel approach of spooing wireless signals by using a general adversarial network (GAN) to generate and transmit synthetic signals that cannot be reliably distinguished from intended signals. It is of paramount importance to authenticate wireless signals at the PHY layer before they proceed through the receiver chain. For that purpose, various waveform, channel, and radio hardware features that are inherent to original wireless signals need to be captured. In the meantime, adversaries become sophisticated with the cognitive radio capability to record, analyze, and manipulate signals before spooing. Building upon deep learning techniques, this paper introduces a spooing attack by an adversary pair of a transmitter and a receiver that assume the generator and discriminator roles in the GAN and play a minimax game to generate the best spooing signals that aim to fool the best trained defense mechanism. The output of this approach is two-fold. From the attacker point of view, a deep learning-based spooing mechanism is trained to potentially fool a defense mechanism such as RF ingerprinting. From the defender point of view, a deep learning-based defense mechanism is trained against potential spooing attacks when an adversary pair of a transmitter and a receiver cooperates. The probability that the spooing signal is misclassiied as the intended signal is measured for random signal, replay, and GAN-based spooing attacks. Results show that the GAN-based spooing attack provides a major increase in the success probability of wireless signal spooing even when a deep learning classiier is used as the defense.