Recently, many deep neural networks (DNN) based modulation classification schemes have been proposed in the literature. We have evaluated the robustness of two famous such modulation classifiers (based on the techniques of convolutional neural networks and long short term memory) against adversarial machine learning attacks in black-box settings. We have used Carlini & Wagner (C-W) attack for performing the adversarial attack. To the best of our knowledge, the robustness of these modulation classifiers has not been evaluated through C-W attack before. Our results clearly indicate that state-of-art deep machine learning-based modulation classifiers are not robust against adversarial attacks.
@cite_6: Neural networks provide state-of-the-art results for most machine learning tasks. Unfortunately, neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples: given an input x and any target classification t, it is possible to find a new input x' that is similar to x but classified as t. This makes it difficult to apply neural networks in security-critical areas. Defensive distillation is a recently proposed approach that can take an arbitrary neural network, and increase its robustness, reducing the success rate of current attacks' ability to find adversarial examples from 95 to 0.5 .In this paper, we demonstrate that defensive distillation does not significantly increase the robustness of neural networks by introducing three new attack algorithms that are successful on both distilled and undistilled neural networks with 100 probability. Our attacks are tailored to three distance metrics used previously in the literature, and when compared to previous adversarial example generation algorithms, our attacks are often much more effective (and never worse). Furthermore, we propose using high-confidence adversarial examples in a simple transferability test we show can also be used to break defensive distillation. We hope our attacks will be used as a benchmark in future defense attempts to create neural networks that resist adversarial examples.
A shortcoming with the FGSM attack is its lack of optimality in adversarial perturbation generation as FGSM was designed to quickly craft adversarial examples irrespective of the optimality and the size of the perturbation in the test example. To overcome the lack of optimality and to highlight that optimal adversarial example for modulation classification can be crafted we have used Carlini & Wagner (C-W) attack @cite_6 where the adversarial examples are crafted using the following optimization process provided in equation .