SecDiff: Diffusion-Aided Secure Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding Against Adversarial Attacks

Changyuan Zhao

doi:10.1109/JSAC.2026.3669143

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SecDiff: Diffusion-Aided Secure Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding Against Adversarial Attacks

2026-03-02

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Zehui Xiong (Zehui Xiong)

Dong In Kim

张

张平 (Ping Zhang)

DOI：10.1109/JSAC.2026.3669143

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Abstract

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Deep joint source-channel coding (JSCC) has emerged as a promising paradigm for semantic communication, delivering significant performance gains over conventional separate coding schemes. However, existing JSCC frameworks remain vulnerable to physical-layer adversarial threats, such as pilot spoofing and subcarrier jamming, compromising semantic fidelity. In this paper, we propose SecDiff, a plug-and-play, diffusion-aided decoding framework that significantly enhances the security and robustness of deep JSCC under adversarial wireless environments. Different from prior diffusion-guided JSCC methods that suffer from high inference latency, SecDiff employs pseudoinverse-guided sampling and adaptive guidance weighting, enabling flexible step-size control and efficient semantic reconstruction. To counter jamming attacks, we introduce a power-based subcarrier masking strategy and recast recovery as a masked inpainting problem, solved via diffusion guidance. For pilot spoofing, we formulate channel estimation as an unknown-operator inverse problem and develop an expectation-minimization (EM)-driven reconstruction algorithm, guided jointly by reconstruction loss and a channel operator. Notably, our method alternates between pilot recovery and channel estimation, enabling joint refinement of both variables throughout the diffusion process. Extensive experiments over orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) channels under adversarial conditions show that SecDiff outperforms existing secure and generative JSCC baselines by achieving a favorable trade-off between reconstruction quality and computational cost. This balance makes SecDiff a promising step toward practical, low-latency, and attack-resilient semantic communications.

Keywords:

Secure semantic communication

deep joint source-channel coding

diffusion models

adversarial wireless attacks