PolymoRF: Polymorphic wireless receivers through physical-layer deep learning

Abstract

Today's wireless technologies are largely based on inflexible designs, which makes them inefficient and prone to a variety of wireless attacks. To address this key issue, wireless receivers will need to (i) infer on-the-fly the physical-layer parameters currently used by transmitters; and if needed, (ii) change their hardware and software structures to demodulate the incoming waveform. In this paper, we introduce PolymoRF, a deep learning-based polymorphic receiver able to reconfigure itself in real time based on the inferred waveform parameters. Our key technical innovations are (i) a novel embedded deep learning architecture, called RFNet, which enables the solution of key waveform inference problems; (ii) a generalized hardware/software architecture that integrates RFNet with radio components and signal processing. We prototype PolymoRF on a custom software-defined radio platform, and show through extensive over-the-air experiments that PolymoRF achieves throughput within 87% of a perfect-knowledge Oracle system, thus demonstrating for the first time that polymorphic receivers are feasible.