Can Knowledge Improve Security? A Coding-Enhanced Jamming Approach for Semantic Communication

As semantic communication (SemCom) attracts growing attention as a novel communication paradigm, ensuring the security of transmitted semantic information over open wireless channels has become a critical issue. However, traditional encryption methods often introduce significant additional communication overhead to maintain reliability, and conventional learning-based secure SemCom methods typically rely on a channel capacity advantage for the legitimate receiver, which is challenging to guarantee in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a coding-enhanced jamming method that eliminates the need to transmit a secret key by utilizing shared knowledge, which may be part of the training set of the SemCom system, between the legitimate receiver and the transmitter. Specifically, we leverage the shared private knowledge base to generate a set of private digital codebooks in advance using neural network (NN)-based encoders. For each transmission, we encode the transmitted data into a digital sequence Y1 and associate Y1 with a sequence randomly picked from the private codebook, denoted as Y2, through superposition coding. Here, Y1 serves as the outer code and Y2 as the inner code. By optimizing the power allocation between the inner and outer codes, the legitimate receiver can reconstruct the transmitted data using successive decoding based on the shared index of Y2, while the eavesdropper's decoding performance is severely degraded, potentially to the point of random guessing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves security comparable to state-of-the-art approaches while significantly improving the reconstruction performance of the legitimate receiver by more than 1 dB across varying channel signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and compression ratios.