Secure Semantic Communications via AI Defenses: Fundamentals, Solutions, and Future Directions

TL;DR

This survey reviews security threats and defense strategies in AI-enabled semantic communication systems, emphasizing vulnerabilities at various system levels and proposing a structured taxonomy for enhancing robustness.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive system-oriented analysis of security issues in SemCom, organizing attack surfaces and defense mechanisms across multiple system components.

Findings

Identifies key threat models including model, channel, knowledge, and network vulnerabilities.

Proposes a taxonomy of defense strategies targeting different security failure modes.

Highlights open challenges in cross-layer security and deployment certification.

Abstract

Semantic communication (SemCom) redefines wireless communication from reproducing symbols to transmitting task-relevant semantics. However, this AI-native architecture also introduces new vulnerabilities, as semantic failures may arise from adversarial perturbations to models, corrupted training data, desynchronized priors, or misaligned inference even when lower-layer transmission reliability and cryptographic protection remain intact. This survey provides a defense-centered and system-oriented synthesis of security in SemCom via AI defense. We analyze AI-centric threat models by consolidating existing studies and organizing attack surfaces across model-level, channel-realizable, knowledge-based, and networked inference vectors. Building on this foundation, we present a structured taxonomy of defense strategies organized by where semantic integrity can be compromised in SemCom systems despite correct symbol delivery, spanning semantic encoding, wireless transmission, knowledge integrity, and coordination among multiple agents. These categories correspond to distinct security failure modes, including representation fragility, channel-realizable manipulation, semantic prior poisoning or desynchronization, and adversarial propagation through distributed inference. We also examine security utility operating envelopes that capture tradeoffs among semantic fidelity, robustness, latency, and energy under realistic constraints, survey evaluation frameworks and representative applications, and identify open challenges in cross-layer composition and deployment-time certification. Overall, this survey offers a unified system-level perspective that enables readers to understand major threat and defense mechanisms in AI-native SemCom systems and to leverage emerging security techniques in the design and deployment of robust SemCom architectures for next-generation intelligent networks.