We consider a wireless communication system that consists of a transmitter, a
receiver, and an adversary. The transmitter transmits signals with different
modulation types, while the receiver classifies its received signals to
modulation types using a deep learning-based classifier. In the meantime, the
adversary makes over-the-air transmissions that are received as superimposed
with the transmitter's signals to fool the classifier at the receiver into
making errors. While this evasion attack has received growing interest
recently, the channel effects from the adversary to the receiver have been
ignored so far such that the previous attack mechanisms cannot be applied under
realistic channel effects. In this paper, we present how to launch a realistic
evasion attack by considering channels from the adversary to the receiver. Our
results show that modulation classification is vulnerable to an adversarial
attack over a wireless channel that is modeled as Rayleigh fading with path
loss and shadowing. We present various adversarial attacks with respect to
availability of information about channel, transmitter input, and classifier
architecture. First, we present two types of adversarial attacks, namely a
targeted attack (with minimum power) and non-targeted attack that aims to
change the classification to a target label or to any other label other than
the true label, respectively. Both are white-box attacks that are transmitter
input-specific and use channel information. Then we introduce an algorithm to
generate adversarial attacks using limited channel information where the
adversary only knows the channel distribution. Finally, we present a black-box
universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) attack where the adversary has limited
knowledge about both channel and transmitter input.