Sensor Security: Current Progress, Research Challenges, and Future Roadmap

Sensors are one of the most pervasive and integral components of today’s safety-critical systems. Sensors serve as a bridge between physical quantities and connected systems. The connected systems with sensors blindly believe the sensor as there is no way to authenticate the signal coming from a sensor. This could be an entry point for an attacker. An attacker can inject a fake input signal along with the legitimate signal by using a suitable spoofing technique. As the sensor’s transducer is not smart enough to differentiate between a fake and legitimate signal, the injected fake signal eventually can collapse the connected system. This type of attack is known as the transduction attack. Over the last decade, several works have been published to provide a defense against the transduction attack. However, the defenses are proposed on an ad-hoc basis; hence, they are not well-structured. Our work begins to fill this gap by providing a checklist that a defense technique should always follow to be considered as an ideal defense against the transduction attack. We name this checklist as the Golden reference of sensor defense. We provide insights on how this Golden reference can be achieved and argue that sensors should be redesigned from the transducer level to the sensor electronics level. We point out that only hardware or software modification is not enough; instead, a hardware/software (HW/SW) co-design approach is required to ride on this future roadmap to the robust and resilient sensor.