Ghost Talk: Mitigating EMI Signal Injection Attacks against Analog Sensors
By Denis Foo Kune, John D. Backes, Shane S. Clark, Daniel B. Kramer, Matthew R. Reynolds, Kevin Fu, Yongdae Kim, Wenyuan Xu. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2013
303 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Electromagnetic interference (EMI) affects circuits by inducing voltages on conductors. Analog sensing of signals on the order of a few millivolts is particularly sensitive to interference. This work (1) measures the susceptibility of analog sensor systems to signal injection attacks by intentional, low-power emission of chosen electromagnetic waveforms, and (2) proposes defense mechanisms to reduce the risks. Our experiments use specially crafted EMI at varying power and distance to measure susceptibility of sensors in implantable medical devices and consumer electronics. Results show that at distances of 1-2m, consumer electronic devices containing microphones are vulnerable to the injection of bogus audio signals. Our measurements show that in free air, intentional EMI under 10 W can inhibit pacing and induce defibrillation shocks at distances up to 1-2m on implantable cardiac electronic devices. However, with the sensing leads and medical devices immersed in a saline bath to better approximate the human body, the same experiment decreases to about 5 cm. Our defenses range from prevention with simple analog shielding to detection with a signal contamination metric based on the root mean square of waveform amplitudes. Our contribution to securing cardiac devices includes a novel defense mechanism that probes for forged pacing pulses inconsistent with the refractory period of cardiac tissue.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hardware and Architecture
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f30e25c325f80beb67502d4bb3c05a1977eeab3b
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Citations in the corpus
- WALNUT: Waging Doubt on the Integrity of MEMS Accelerometers with Acoustic Injection Attacks (2017, background): “Foo Kune et al. [30] show how carefully crafted electromagnetic interference (EMI) can be injected into signal digitization circuitry inside implantable medical devices to control the delivery of pacing and defibrillation shocks.”
- Rocking Drones with Intentional Sound Noise on Gyroscopic Sensors (2015, background): “[45] to detect and cancel out analog sensor input spoofing against CIEDs.”