NDSS 2025 – Magmaw: Modality-Agnostic Adversarial Attacks
SESSION
Session 3B: Wireless, Cellular & Satellite Security
Authors, Creators & Presenters: Jung-Woo Chang (University of California, San Diego), Ke Sun (University of California, San Diego), Nasimeh Heydaribeni (University of California, San Diego), Seira Hidano (KDDI Research, Inc.), Xinyu Zhang (University of California, San Diego), Farinaz Koushanfar (University of California, San Diego)
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PAPER
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Magmaw: Modality-Agnostic Adversarial Attacks on Machine Learning-Based Wireless Communication Systems
Machine Learning (ML) has been instrumental in enabling joint transceiver optimization by merging all physical layer blocks of the end-to-end wireless communication systems. Although there have been a number of adversarial attacks on ML-based wireless systems, the existing methods do not provide a comprehensive view including multi-modality of the source data, common physical layer protocols, and wireless domain constraints. This paper proposes Magmaw, a novel wireless attack methodology capable of generating universal adversarial perturbations for any multimodal signal transmitted over a wireless channel. We further introduce new objectives for adversarial attacks on downstream applications. We adopt the widely used defenses to verify the resilience of Magmaw. For proof-of-concept evaluation, we build a real-time wireless attack platform using a software-defined radio system. Experimental results demonstrate that Magmaw causes significant performance degradation even in the presence of strong defense mechanisms. Furthermore, we validate the performance of Magmaw in two case studies: encrypted communication channel and channel modality-based ML model. Our code is available at [https://github.com/juc023/Magmaw].
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ABOUT NDSS
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The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.
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