An adversarial machine learning approach is introduced to launch jamming
attacks on wireless communications and a defense strategy is presented. A
cognitive transmitter uses a pre-trained classifier to predict the current
channel status based on recent sensing results and decides whether to transmit
or not, whereas a jammer collects channel status and ACKs to build a deep
learning classifier that reliably predicts the next successful transmissions
and effectively jams them. This jamming approach is shown to reduce the
transmitter's performance much more severely compared with random or
sensing-based jamming. The deep learning classification scores are used by the
jammer for power control subject to an average power constraint. Next, a
generative adversarial network (GAN) is developed for the jammer to reduce the
time to collect the training dataset by augmenting it with synthetic samples.
As a defense scheme, the transmitter deliberately takes a small number of wrong
actions in spectrum access (in form of a causative attack against the jammer)
and therefore prevents the jammer from building a reliable classifier. The
transmitter systematically selects when to take wrong actions and adapts the
level of defense to mislead the jammer into making prediction errors and
consequently increase its throughput.