Secure Semantic Communication With Homomorphic Encryption
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jan 17, 2025
Abstract
In recent years, Semantic Communication (SemCom), which aims to achieve
efficient and reliable transmission of meaning between agents, has garnered
significant attention from both academia and industry. To ensure the security
of communication systems, encryption techniques are employed to safeguard
confidentiality and integrity. However, traditional cryptography-based
encryption algorithms encounter obstacles when applied to SemCom. Motivated by
this, this paper explores the feasibility of applying homomorphic encryption to
SemCom. Initially, we review the encryption algorithms utilized in mobile
communication systems and analyze the challenges associated with their
application to SemCom. Subsequently, we employ scale-invariant feature
transform to demonstrate that semantic features can be preserved in homomorphic
encrypted ciphertext. Based on this finding, we propose a task-oriented SemCom
scheme secured through homomorphic encryption. We design the privacy preserved
deep joint source-channel coding (JSCC) encoder and decoder, and the frequency
of key updates can be adjusted according to service requirements without
compromising transmission performance. Simulation results validate that, when
compared to plaintext images, the proposed scheme can achieve almost the same
classification accuracy performance when dealing with homomorphic ciphertext
images. Furthermore, we provide potential future research directions for
homomorphic encrypted SemCom.
