VENENA: A Deceptive Visual Encryption Framework for Wireless Semantic Secrecy

TL;DR

VENENA is an AI-enabled visual encryption framework that actively deceives eavesdroppers in wireless semantic communication, ensuring legitimate receivers accurately recover messages while limiting eavesdropper success.

Contribution

It introduces a practical, system-level visual encryption method for semantic security in wireless communications, combining AI classifiers with superimposed images for active deception.

Findings

Achieves over 93% accuracy for legitimate receivers.

Limits eavesdropper success to 52%.

Validates active defense in 6G semantic systems.

Abstract

Eavesdropping has been a long-standing threat to the security and privacy of wireless communications, since it is difficult to detect and costly to prevent. As networks evolve towards Sixth Generation (6G) and semantic communication becomes increasingly central to next-generation wireless systems, securing semantic information transmission emerges as a critical challenge. While classical physical layer security (PLS) focuses on passive security, the recently proposed concept of physical layer deception (PLD) offers a semantic encryption measure to actively deceive eavesdroppers. Yet the existing studies of PLD have been dominantly information-theoretical and link-level oriented, lacking considerations of system-level design and practical implementation. In this work we propose Visual ENcryption for Eavesdropping NegAtion (VENENA), an artificial intelligence-enabled framework for secure image-based communication. VENENA protects confidential messages by encoding them visually while actively deceiving eavesdroppers: legitimate receivers use artificial intelligence (AI)-based classifiers to extract true message semantics, while interceptors perceive only falsified content. The framework transmits two superimposed image components with different power levels - a high-power decoy image and a low-power correction mask - ensuring only authorized receivers with favorable channel conditions can reconstruct the true message. Experimental validation demonstrates over 93% accuracy for legitimate users while limiting eavesdropper success to 52% even when system design is fully known, validating VENENA's active defense capability for 6G semantic communication.