Robustness of Deep Learning-Based Specific Emitter Identification under Adversarial Attacks

Abstract

Deep learning (DL)-based specific emitter identification (SEI) technique can automatically extract radio frequency (RF) fingerprint features in RF signals to distinguish between legal and illegal devices and enhance the security of wireless network. However, deep neural network (DNN) can easily be fooled by adversarial examples or perturbations of the input data. If a malicious device emits signals containing a specially designed adversarial samples, will the DL-based SEI still work stably to correctly identify the malicious device? To the best of our knowledge, this research is still blank, let alone the corresponding defense methods. Therefore, this paper designs two scenarios of attack and defense and proposes the corresponding implementation methods to specializes in the robustness of DL-based SEI under adversarial attacks. On this basis, detailed experiments are carried out based on the real-world data and simulation data. The attack scenario is that the malicious device adds an adversarial perturbation signal specially designed to the original signal, misleading the original system to make a misjudgment. Experiments based on three different attack generation methods show that DL-based SEI is very vulnerability. Even if the intensity is very low, without affecting the probability density distribution of the original signal, the performance can be reduced to about 50%, and at −22 dB it is completely invalid. In the defense scenario, the adversarial training (AT) of DL-based SEI is added, which can significantly improve the system’s performance under adversarial attacks, with ≥60% improvement in the recognition rate compared to the network without AT. Further, AT has a more robust effect on white noise. This study fills the relevant gaps and provides guidance for future research. In the future research, the impact of adversarial attacks must be considered, and it is necessary to add adversarial training in the training process.