Signal Injection Attacks against CCD Image Sensors
This addresses security vulnerabilities in safety-critical systems like autonomous vehicles and surveillance, representing a novel attack vector rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of coarse-grained optical attacks on image sensors by introducing a novel electromagnetic signal injection attack that manipulates individual pixel brightness in CCD sensors, demonstrating its feasibility to disrupt automated barcode scanning systems.
Since cameras have become a crucial part in many safety-critical systems and applications, such as autonomous vehicles and surveillance, a large body of academic and non-academic work has shown attacks against their main component - the image sensor. However, these attacks are limited to coarse-grained and often suspicious injections because light is used as an attack vector. Furthermore, due to the nature of optical attacks, they require the line-of-sight between the adversary and the target camera. In this paper, we present a novel post-transducer signal injection attack against CCD image sensors, as they are used in professional, scientific, and even military settings. We show how electromagnetic emanation can be used to manipulate the image information captured by a CCD image sensor with the granularity down to the brightness of individual pixels. We study the feasibility of our attack and then demonstrate its effects in the scenario of automatic barcode scanning. Our results indicate that the injected distortion can disrupt automated vision-based intelligent systems.