An Analysis of Signal Energy Impacts and Threats to Deep Learning Based SEI

Abstract

Specific Emitter Identification (SEI) was conceived to detect, characterize, and identify radars using their transmitted signals. SEI’s success is linked to the imperfections of an emitter’s Radio Frequency (RF) front-end, which imparts unique "coloration" to the signal during its formation and transmission without impeding normal transceiver operations. Recent works propose Deep Learning (DL) based SEI due to its demonstrated successes in image and facial recognition, as well as its ability to learn radio-specific features directly from the sampled signals. This removes the needless, handcrafted feature engineering of traditional SEI. However, signal energy, its impacts, and its susceptibility to adversary mimicry has received little attention by DL-based SEI works. This work is the first to investigate the impacts and threats posed to DL-based SEI by the presence, lack, or manipulation of signal energy. Our work shows that Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based SEI provides the highest average percent correct classification performance of 89.9% and the lowest rate, 0.68%, at which an adversary can circumvent the SEI process by manipulating the energy of its signals.