Rainbow Artifacts from Electromagnetic Signal Injection Attacks on Image Sensors
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jul 10, 2025
Abstract
Image sensors are integral to a wide range of safety- and security-critical
systems, including surveillance infrastructure, autonomous vehicles, and
industrial automation. These systems rely on the integrity of visual data to
make decisions. In this work, we investigate a novel class of electromagnetic
signal injection attacks that target the analog domain of image sensors,
allowing adversaries to manipulate raw visual inputs without triggering
conventional digital integrity checks. We uncover a previously undocumented
attack phenomenon on CMOS image sensors: rainbow-like color artifacts induced
in images captured by image sensors through carefully tuned electromagnetic
interference. We further evaluate the impact of these attacks on
state-of-the-art object detection models, showing that the injected artifacts
propagate through the image signal processing pipeline and lead to significant
mispredictions. Our findings highlight a critical and underexplored
vulnerability in the visual perception stack, highlighting the need for more
robust defenses against physical-layer attacks in such systems.
