The paper presents a novel approach of spoofing wireless signals by using a
general adversarial network (GAN) to generate and transmit synthetic signals
that cannot be reliably distinguished from intended signals. It is of paramount
importance to authenticate wireless signals at the PHY layer before they
proceed through the receiver chain. For that purpose, various waveform,
channel, and radio hardware features that are inherent to original wireless
signals need to be captured. In the meantime, adversaries become sophisticated
with the cognitive radio capability to record, analyze, and manipulate signals
before spoofing. Building upon deep learning techniques, this paper introduces
a spoofing attack by an adversary pair of a transmitter and a receiver that
assume the generator and discriminator roles in the GAN and play a minimax game
to generate the best spoofing signals that aim to fool the best trained defense
mechanism. The output of this approach is two-fold. From the attacker point of
view, a deep learning-based spoofing mechanism is trained to potentially fool a
defense mechanism such as RF fingerprinting. From the defender point of view, a
deep learning-based defense mechanism is trained against potential spoofing
attacks when an adversary pair of a transmitter and a receiver cooperates. The
probability that the spoofing signal is misclassified as the intended signal is
measured for random signal, replay, and GAN-based spoofing attacks. Results
show that the GAN-based spoofing attack provides a major increase in the
success probability of wireless signal spoofing even when a deep learning
classifier is used as the defense.