| Title | Laser-Based Signal-Injection Attack on Piezoresistive MEMS Pressure Sensors |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2022 |
| Authors | Tanaka, Tatsuki, Sugawara, Takeshi |
| Conference Name | 2022 IEEE Sensors |
| Keywords | command injection attacks, composability, MEMS Pressure Sensor, Metrics, Micromechanical devices, Optical Interference, Piezoresistive devices, Power lasers, pressure sensors, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, Security of Sensors, semiconductor lasers, Sensor phenomena and characterization, Signal-Injection Attack, Systematics |
| Abstract | As more and more information systems rely sen-sors for their critical decisions, there is a growing threat of injecting false signals to sensors in the analog domain. In particular, LightCommands showed that MEMS microphones are susceptible to light, through the photoacoustic and photoelectric effects, enabling an attacker to silently inject voice commands to smart speakers. Understanding such unexpected transduction mechanisms is essential for designing secure and reliable MEMS sensors. Is there any other transduction mechanism enabling laser-induced attacks? We positively answer the question by experimentally evaluating two commercial piezoresistive MEMS pressure sensors. By shining a laser light at the piezoresistors through an air hole on the sensor package, the pressure reading changes by +-1000 hPa with 0.5 mW laser power. This phenomenon can be explained by the photoelectric effect at the piezoresistors, which increases the number of carriers and decreases the resistance. We finally show that an attacker can induce the target signal at the sensor reading by shining an amplitude-modulated laser light. |
| Notes | ISSN: 2168-9229 |
| DOI | 10.1109/SENSORS52175.2022.9967044 |
| Citation Key | tanaka_laser-based_2022 |
Laser-Based Signal-Injection Attack on Piezoresistive MEMS Pressure Sensors