Assessing adversarial replay and deep learning-driven attacks on specific emitter identification-based security approaches

Specific Emitter Identification (SEI) has been put forward as an Internet of Things (IoT) Physical Layer Security (PLS) approach for its abilities to detect, characterize, and identify wireless emitters by exploiting distinct, inherent, and unintentional features in their transmitted signals. Since its introduction, a significant amount of work has been conducted; however, most assume the emitters are passive and their identifying signal features are immutable and challenging to mimic. This suggests the emitters are reluctant and incapable of developing and implementing effective SEI countermeasures; however, Deep Learning (DL) has been shown capable of learning emitter-specific features directly from their raw in-phase and quadrature signal samples, while Software-Defined Radios (SDRs) are capable of manipulating these signal samples. Based on these capabilities, it is fair to question the ease at which an emitter can effectively mimic the SEI features of another or manipulate its own to hinder or defeat SEI. This work considers SEI mimicry using three signal features mimicking countermeasures; “off-the-self” DL; two SDRs of different sizes, weights, power, and cost (SWaP-C); handcrafted and DL-based SEI processes, and assessment of an SEI mimicry countermeasure in a “coffee shop” deployment. Our results show “off-the-shelf” DL algorithms, and SDR enables SEI mimicry; however, adversary success is hindered by: (i) the use of decoy emitter preambles, (ii) the use of a denoising autoencoder and (iii) SDR SWaP-C constraints.