Experimental study on the adversary attack vulnerabilities in IoT and CPS actuators and sensors through electromagnetic fault injection
Jhon Zylvin M. Ramosi, Marvin O. Mallariz, Arvin De La Cruz · 2025
In Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) applications, actuators or sensor data integrity plays a paramount role. We created and validated, in this experimental work, a cheap programmable Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EMFI) pulse injection circuit on several experimental IoT/CPS sensor and actuator set ups, testing at various EMFI parameters with respect to the EMFI fault model technique, to investigate susceptibilities to adversary fault injection attacks. Specifically, the results expose convincing attack scenario, exemplifying the adversarial ability to corrupt the readings of sensors and actuation control signals by exploiting the EMFI. In addition, this study stresses the importance of the attack accuracy for the EMFI attack success, especially communicating with secure sensors and actuators. Communication protocols and vulnerability profiles that we are talking about are extremely complex and this points out how important is to understand the complex protocols. This research adds to the existing knowledge base of the topic by highlighting adversarial EMFI as a vulnerability in IoT/CPS systems and helps to explore building more robust and resilient systems in the future.