English

Hacking the Waveform: Generalized Wireless Adversarial Deep Learning

Networking and Internet Architecture 2020-05-06 v1 Signal Processing

Abstract

This paper advances the state of the art by proposing the first comprehensive analysis and experimental evaluation of adversarial learning attacks to wireless deep learning systems. We postulate a series of adversarial attacks, and formulate a Generalized Wireless Adversarial Machine Learning Problem (GWAP) where we analyze the combined effect of the wireless channel and the adversarial waveform on the efficacy of the attacks. We propose a new neural network architecture called FIRNet, which can be trained to "hack" a classifier based only on its output. We extensively evaluate the performance on (i) a 1,000-device radio fingerprinting dataset, and (ii) a 24-class modulation dataset. Results obtained with several channel conditions show that our algorithms can decrease the classifier accuracy up to 3x. We also experimentally evaluate FIRNet on a radio testbed, and show that our data-driven blackbox approach can confuse the classifier up to 97% while keeping the waveform distortion to a minimum.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.02270,
  title  = {Hacking the Waveform: Generalized Wireless Adversarial Deep Learning},
  author = {Francesco Restuccia and Salvatore D'Oro and Amani Al-Shawabka and Bruno Costa Rendon and Kaushik Chowdhury and Stratis Ioannidis and Tommaso Melodia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.02270},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

submitted for publication, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:19:38.002Z