Detection Tolerant Black-Box Adversarial Attack Against Automatic Modulation Classification With Deep Learning

Advances in adversarial attack and defense technologies will enhance the reliability of deep learning (DL) systems spirally. Most existing adversarial attack methods make overly ideal assumptions, which creates the illusion that the DL system can be attacked simply and has restricted the further improvement on DL systems. To perform practical adversarial attacks, a detection tolerant black-box adversarial-attack (DTBA) method against DL-based automatic modulation classification (AMC) is presented in this article. In the DTBA method, the local DL model as a substitution of the remote target DL model is trained first. The training dataset is generated by an attacker, labeled by the target model, and augmented by Jacobian transformation. Then, the conventional gradient attack method is utilized to generate adversarial attack examples toward the local DL model. Moreover, before launching attack to the target model, the local model estimates the misclassification probability of the perturbed examples in advance and deletes those invalid adversarial examples. Compared with related attack methods of different criteria on public datasets, the DTBA method can reduce the attack cost while increasing the rate of successful attack. Adversarial attack transferability of the proposed method on the target model has increased by more than 20%. The DTBA method will be suitable for launching flexible and effective black-box adversarial attacks against DL-based AMC systems.