Learning-Aided Physical Layer Attacks Against Multicarrier Communications in IoT

Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices that are limited in power and processing capabilities are susceptible to physical layer (PHY) spoofing attacks owing to their inability to implement a full-blown protocol stack for security. The overwhelming adoption of multicarrier communications for the PHY layer makes IoT devices further vulnerable to PHY spoofing attacks. These attacks which aim at injecting bogus data into the receiver, involve inferring transmission parameters and finding PHY characteristics of the transmitted signals so as to spoof the received signal. Non-contiguous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (NC-OFDM) systems have been argued to have low probability of exploitation (LPE) characteristics against classic attacks based on cyclostationary analysis. However, with the advent of machine learning (ML) algorithms, adversaries can devise data-driven attacks to compromise such systems. It is in this vein that PHY spoofing performance of adversaries equipped with supervised and unsupervised ML tools are investigated in this paper. The supervised ML approach is based on estimation/classification utilizing deep neural networks (DNN) while the unsupervised one employs variational autoencoders (VAEs). In particular, VAEs are shown to be capable of learning representations from NC-OFDM signals related to their PHY characteristics such as frequency pattern and modulation scheme, which are useful for PHY spoofing. In addition, a new metric based on the disentanglement principle is proposed to measure the quality of such learned representations. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the spoofing adversaries highly depends on the subcarriers' allocation patterns used at the transmitter. Particularly, it is shown that utilizing a random subcarrier occupancy pattern precludes the adversary from spoofing and secures NC-OFDM systems against ML-based attacks.