Secure Digital Semantic Communications: Fundamentals, Challenges, and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper reviews the fundamentals, security challenges, and potential solutions for digital semantic communication systems, emphasizing their vulnerabilities and the need for systematic security analysis.

Contribution

It provides a structured review of secure digital SemCom, highlighting differences from analog SemCom and outlining open research directions.

Findings

Digital SemCom introduces unique vulnerabilities at bit and symbol levels.

Threat landscape includes semantic leakage, manipulation, and protocol attacks.

The paper discusses potential defense mechanisms and future research directions.

Abstract

Semantic communication (SemCom) has emerged as a promising paradigm for future wireless networks by prioritizing task-relevant meaning over raw data delivery, thereby reducing communication overhead and improving efficiency. However, shifting from bit-accurate transmission to task-oriented delivery introduces new security and privacy risks. These include semantic leakage, semantic manipulation, knowledge base vulnerabilities, model-related attacks, and threats to authenticity and availability. Most existing secure SemCom studies focus on analog SemCom, where semantic features are mapped to continuous channel inputs. In contrast, digital SemCom transmits semantic information through discrete bits or symbols within practical transceiver pipelines, offering stronger compatibility with realworld systems while exposing a distinct and underexplored attack surface. In particular, digital SemCom typically represents semantic information over a finite alphabet through explicit digital modulation, following two main routes: probabilistic modulation and deterministic modulation. These discrete mechanisms and practical transmission procedures introduce additional vulnerabilities affecting bit- or symbol-level semantic information, the modulation stage, and packet-based delivery and protocol operations. Motivated by these challenges and the lack of a systematic analysis of secure digital SemCom, this paper provides a structured review of the area. Specifically, we review SemCom fundamentals and clarify the architectural differences between analog and digital SemCom. We then summarize threats shared by both paradigms and organize the threat landscape specific to digital SemCom, followed by a discussion of potential defenses. Finally, we outline open research directions toward secure and deployable digital SemCom systems.