Can Knowledge Improve Security? A Coding-Enhanced Jamming Approach for Semantic Communication
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Apr 23, 2025
Abstract
As semantic communication (SemCom) attracts growing attention as a novel
communication paradigm, ensuring the security of transmitted semantic
information over open wireless channels has become a critical issue. However,
traditional encryption methods often introduce significant additional
communication overhead to maintain stability, and conventional learning-based
secure SemCom methods typically rely on a channel capacity advantage for the
legitimate receiver, which is challenging to guarantee in real-world scenarios.
In this paper, we propose a coding-enhanced jamming method that eliminates the
need to transmit a secret key by utilizing shared knowledge-potentially part of
the training set of the SemCom system-between the legitimate receiver and the
transmitter. Specifically, we leverage the shared private knowledge base to
generate a set of private digital codebooks in advance using neural network
(NN)-based encoders. For each transmission, we encode the transmitted data into
digital sequence Y1 and associate Y1 with a sequence randomly picked from the
private codebook, denoted as Y2, through superposition coding. Here, Y1 serves
as the outer code and Y2 as the inner code. By optimizing the power allocation
between the inner and outer codes, the legitimate receiver can reconstruct the
transmitted data using successive decoding with the index of Y2 shared, while
the eavesdropper' s decoding performance is severely degraded, potentially to
the point of random guessing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method
achieves comparable security to state-of-the-art approaches while significantly
improving the reconstruction performance of the legitimate receiver by more
than 1 dB across varying channel signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and compression
ratios.
