GhostShot: Manipulating the Image of CCD Cameras with Electromagnetic Interference
Yanze Ren
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025 · Day 2 · Electromagnetic Attacks
In a groundbreaking presentation at the NDSS Symposium, Yanze Ren unveiled "GhostShot," a novel attack demonstrating the ability to manipulate images captured by **Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) cameras** using precisely engineered **Electromagnetic Interference (EMI)** signals. This research significantly expands the known attack surface against these pervasive imaging sensors, which are critical components in a vast array of intelligent systems, including fire detection, night vision, barcode scanning, and medical diagnostics. The talk highlighted the severe implications of such an attack, where an adversary could inject arbitrary, colorful patterns into camera feeds under normal lighting conditions, potentially leading to catastrophic misjudgments by automated systems or human operators.
AI review
GhostShot is legitimate hardware security research that advances the state of the art on transient electromagnetic injection attacks against CCD imaging pipelines. The jump from prior grayscale-only, dark-environment injection to arbitrary colorful patterns under ambient light conditions is a real technical contribution — not a marginal one — and the 100% success rate across 15 devices suggests the vulnerability class is structural, not incidental.