Modeling Electromagnetic Signal Injection Attacks on Camera-based Smart Systems: Applications and Mitigation

Numerous safety- or security-critical systems depend on cameras to perceive their surroundings, further allowing artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze the captured images to make important decisions. However, a concerning attack vector has emerged, namely, electromagnetic waves, which pose a threat to the integrity of these systems. Such attacks enable attackers to manipulate the images remotely, leading to incorrect AI decisions, e.g., autonomous vehicles missing detecting obstacles ahead resulting in collisions. The lack of understanding regarding how different systems react to such attacks poses a significant security risk. Furthermore, no effective solutions have been demonstrated to mitigate this threat. To address these gaps, we modeled the attacks and developed a simulation method for generating adversarial images. Through rigorous analysis, we confirmed that the effects of the simulated adversarial images are indistinguishable from those from real attacks. This method enables researchers and engineers to rapidly assess the susceptibility of various AI vision applications to these attacks, without the need for constructing complicated attack devices. In our experiments, most of the models demonstrated vulnerabilities to these attacks, emphasizing the need to enhance their robustness. Fortunately, our modeling and simulation method serves as a stepping stone toward developing more resilient models. We present a pilot study on adversarial training to improve their robustness against attacks, and our results demonstrate a significant improvement by recovering up to 91% performance, offering a promising direction for mitigating this threat.

Understanding Impacts of Electromagnetic Signal Injection Attacks on Object Detection

Object detection can localize and identify objects in images, and it is extensively employed in critical multimedia applications such as security surveillance and autonomous driving. Despite the success of existing object detection models, they are often evaluated in ideal scenarios where captured images guarantee the accurate and complete representation of the detecting scenes. However, images captured by image sensors may be affected by different factors in real applications, including cyber-physical attacks. In particular, attackers can exploit hardware properties within the systems to inject electromagnetic interference so as to manipulate the images. Such attacks can cause noisy or incomplete information about the captured scene, leading to incorrect detection results, potentially granting attackers malicious control over critical functions of the systems. This paper presents a research work that comprehensively quantifies and analyzes the impacts of such attacks on state-of-the-art object detection models in practice. It also sheds light on the underlying reasons for the incorrect detection outcomes.