PhantomTac: Hijacking Robotic Tactile Systems with Deploy-and-forget Tags

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Article Summary

Tactile perception is crucial for precise robotic manipulation, providing an important foundation for dexterous, closed-loop force control. Among various tactile sensing techniques, magnetic tactile sensors stand out thanks to their fine-grained, three-dimensional force perception capability and strong robustness against visual occlusion. In this study, we discover a physical loophole called PhantomTac in magnetic tactile sensors. The attacker can alter the magnetic field, thus spoofing the force interpreted by magnetic tactile sensors. The attacker can stealthily deploy such an attack by simply attaching a thin (the thickness is around 0.5 mm), battery-free magnetic tag to the surface of an object. Hence, the attack tag can be easily concealed by a barcode sticker. Such an attack scheme is "deploy-and-forget" -- the attacker can deploy the tag and leave. When a robotic hand is picking up an object, it may severely damage the object. Specifically, spoofing the normal force can crush the object, whereas spoofing the shear force can lead to a loose grip, thus dropping the object. Compared with directly sabotaging the robotic hand, PhantomTac is much more concealed as the attacker does not need access to the device. We performed extensive reverse-engineering efforts to characterize the sensing mechanism of commercial-off-the-shelf tactile sensors and proposed a practical tag design. End-to-end evaluations conducted on real robots and robotic arms demonstrate that our attack can bypass existing anti-interference mechanisms and effectively hijack their closed-loop control processes, achieving an attack success rate exceeding 95% when the grasping-position offset is bounded within 8 mm. Finally, based on the limitations of existing anti-magnetic interference mechanisms, we propose a multimodal-consistency defense mechanism to mitigate such physical-layer security threats.

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