March 3, 2023
11:00am - 12:00pm

By exploiting sensors and electronic components flaws, attackers can get the upper hand against even the most carefully designed system. Attack results range from extracting sensitive information by observing unintentional emissions through physical parameters (e.g., mechanical vibrations), to undermine the system's capacity to correctly acquire, process, and interpret external stimuli. In this talk will be presented multiple examples of how an adversary can control autonomous system’s perception without accessing its internal statuses, and side channels involving built-in sensors present in commodity phones (e.g., cameras) that can inadvertently capture sensitive information from the surrounding environment (e.g., human speech). Finally, we will go through hardware and software strategies to mitigate those threats.

Sara Rampazzi is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) at University of Florida. Her research areas focus on cyber-physical systems security, embedded systems design, modeling, and simulation with applications in Healthcare, Autonomous Systems, and the Internet of Things. Dr. Rampazzi investigates security and privacy risks and designs defense strategies for trustworthy and resilient cyber-physical systems despite emerging attacks. Several media outlets covered her work on injecting inaudible and invisible commands to smart home devices Light Commands. Forbes has recognized her work on Lidar spoofing attacks on autonomous vehicles as the first paper on practical attacks against a LiDAR system. Dr. Rampazzi has received the Medtronic Outstanding Research Contributor Recognition for medical device security, and her work has been sponsored by NSF, Meta, and Toyota Info Tech Lab.