Recently proliferated deep learning-based semantic communications (DLSC) focus on how transmitted symbols efficiently convey a desired meaning to the destination. However, the sensitivity of neural models and the openness of wireless channels cause the DLSC system to be extremely fragile to various malicious attacks. This inspires us to ask a question: “Can we further exploit the advantages of transmission efficiency in wireless semantic communications while also alleviating its security disadvantages?”. Keeping this in mind, we propose SemEntropy, a novel method that answers the above question by exploring the semantics of data for both adaptive transmission and physical layer encryption. Specifically, we first introduce semantic entropy, which indicates the expectation of various semantic scores regarding the transmission goal of the DLSC. Equipped with such semantic entropy, we can dynamically assign informative semantics to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) subcarriers with better channel conditions in a fine-grained manner. We also use the entropy to guide semantic key generation to safeguard communications over open wireless channels. By doing so, both transmission efficiency and channel security can be simultaneously improved. Extensive experiments over various benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed SemEntropy. We discuss the reason why our proposed method benefits secure transmission of DLSC, and also give some interesting findings, e.g., SemEntropy can keep the semantic accuracy remain 95% with 60% less transmission.

Deep learning based semantic communication (DLSC) systems have shown great potential of making wireless networks significantly more efficient by only transmitting the semantics of the data. However, the open nature of wireless channel and fragileness of neural models cause DLSC systems extremely vulnerable to various attacks. Traditional wireless physical layer key (PLK), which relies on reciprocal channel and randomness characteristics between two legitimate users, holds the promise of securing DLSC. The main challenge lies in generating secret keys in the static environment with ultra-low/zero rate. Different from prior efforts that use relays or reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) to manipulate wireless channels, this paper proposes a novel physical layer semantic encryption scheme by exploring the randomness of bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) scores in the field of machine translation, and additionally presents a novel semantic obfuscation mechanism to provide further physical layer protections. Specifically, 1) we calculate the BLEU scores and corresponding weights of the DLSC system. Then, we generate semantic keys (SKey) by feeding the weighted sum of the scores into a hash function. 2) Equipped with the SKey, our proposed subcarrier obfuscation is able to further secure semantic communications with a dynamic dummy data insertion mechanism. Experiments show the effectiveness of our method, especially in the static wireless environment.