Secure Communication via Modulation Order Confusion

Abstract

With the increasing threat posed by modulation classification to wireless security, this paper proposes a secure communication framework based on modulation order confusion (MOC), which intentionally disguises the original modulation as a higher- or lower-order one to mislead eavesdroppers. For single-antenna systems, two schemes are developed: symbol random mapping and symbol time diversity, enabling modulation order confusion with customized receivers. For multi-antenna systems, receiver-transparent MOC schemes are proposed, including series-expansion-based and constellation-path-based signal designs, and are further extended to RIS-assisted systems with joint beamformer and RIS reflection design. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes effectively defeat both deep-learning-based and expert-knowledge-based modulation classifiers without degrading communication performance.