Phantom Force: Injecting Adversarial Tactile Perceptions into Embodied Intelligence via EMI

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 13 May 2026] Phantom Force: Injecting Adversarial Tactile Perceptions into Embodied Intelligence via EMI Zirui Kong, Youqian Zhang, Sze Yiu Chau Embodied intelligent robots rely on tactile sensors to interact with the physical world safely. While the security of visual perception systems has been studied (e.g., adversarial samples), the integrity of the tactile sensory channel remains unexplored. This work explores a vulnerability in Hall-effect fingertip sensors, showing their susceptibility to intentional Electromagnetic Interference (EMI). We demonstrate that a targeted signal injection can induce strong ``phantom forces'', amplifying perceived force magnitude by over \textbf{9\times} and deviating the inferred force direction by \textbf{65^\circ}. Such perturbations can paralyze learning-based tactile classification models, seriously affecting robot movement. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to coerce a robot hand into crushing fragile objects or dropping dangerous payloads. Comments: ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIA CCS '26), June 1--5, 2026, Bangalore, India Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2605.13492 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.13492v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.13492 Focus to learn more Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3779208.3804894 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Zirui Kong [view email] [v1] Wed, 13 May 2026 13:16:44 UTC (581 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)