Robust Model Ensembling Against Wireless Adversarial Attacks for Semantic Communications

Recently, semantic communication has received increasing attention for its potential to enhance efficiency, yet research on semantic security is still in its infancy. Due to the open nature of wireless channels, semantic communication systems are susceptible to wireless adversarial attacks. These attacks entail introducing deliberately crafted perturbation signals to legitimate signals over the wireless channel, which misleads the semantic interpretation at the receiver. This paper explores defense approaches from a practical perspective. To better characterize real-world wireless adversarial attacks, we first introduce an effective attack model named Adjustable Perturbation Generator (APG), designed to generate perturbation signals of various power levels. To combat these attacks, we propose a novel framework called Robust Model Ensembling for Semantic Communication (ROME-SC). Specifically, a Multi-level Perturbation Detector (MPD) is developed to detect the presence of attacks and measure their power levels. Then, the robust model ensembling approach is proposed to handle wireless adversarial attacks adaptively with the assistance of the MPD. Simulation results show that the proposed ROME-SC significantly enhances the overall performance of semantic communication systems under wireless adversarial attacks.