Fengchen Yang (Zhejiang University), Wenze Cui (Zhejiang University), Xinfeng Li (Zhejiang University), Chen Yan (Zhejiang University), Xiaoyu Ji (Zhejiang University), Wenyuan Xu (Zhejiang University)

Fluorescent lamps are almost everywhere for electric lighting in daily life, across private and public scenarios. Our study uncovers a new electromagnetic interference (EMI) attack surface that these light sources are actually able to manipulate nearby IoT devices in a contactless way. Different from previous EMI attempts requiring a specialized metal antenna as the emission source, which can easily alert victims, we introduce LightAntenna that leverages unaltered everyday fluorescent lamps to launch concealed EMI attacks. To understand why and how fluorescent lamps can be exploited as malicious antennas, we systematically characterize the rationale of EMI emission from fluorescent lamps and identify their capabilities and limits in terms of intensity and frequency response. Moreover, we carefully design a covert method of injecting high-frequency signals into the fluorescent tube via power line transmission. In this way, LightAntenna can realize controllable EMI attacks even across rooms and at a distance of up to 20 m. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the generality, practicality, tunability, and remote attack capability of LightAntenna, which successfully interferes with various types of sensors and IoT devices. In summary, our study provides a comprehensive analysis of the LightAntenna mechanism and proposes defensive strategies to mitigate this emerging attack surface.

View More Papers

Was This You? Investigating the Design Considerations for Suspicious...

Sena Sahin (Georgia Institute of Technology), Burak Sahin (Georgia Institute of Technology), Frank Li (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Read More

Incorporating Gradients to Rules: Towards Lightweight, Adaptive Provenance-based Intrusion...

Lingzhi Wang (Northwestern University), Xiangmin Shen (Northwestern University), Weijian Li (Northwestern University), Zhenyuan LI (Zhejiang University), R. Sekar (Stony Brook University), Han Liu (Northwestern University), Yan Chen (Northwestern University)

Read More

SCAMMAGNIFIER: Piercing the Veil of Fraudulent Shopping Website Campaigns

Marzieh Bitaab (Arizona State University), Alireza Karimi (Arizona State University), Zhuoer Lyu (Arizona State University), Adam Oest (Amazon), Dhruv Kuchhal (Amazon), Muhammad Saad (X Corp.), Gail-Joon Ahn (Arizona State University), Ruoyu Wang (Arizona State University), Tiffany Bao (Arizona State University), Yan Shoshitaishvili (Arizona State University), Adam Doupé (Arizona State University)

Read More

Automated Expansion of Privacy Data Taxonomy for Compliant Data...

Yue Qin (Indiana University Bloomington & Central University of Finance and Economics), Yue Xiao (Indiana University Bloomington & IBM Research), Xiaojing Liao (Indiana University Bloomington)

Read More