Invited Paper: Security Under the Lens: Vulnerabilities in In-Sensor Computing Systems

In-Sensor Computing (ISC) systems integrate sensing and computing units within a single device, enabling low-latency, energy-efficient applications through direct analog-to-feature conversion. However, the intrinsic tight coupling between sensing and computational components introduces significant security vulnerabilities. These arise particularly in scenarios where adversaries have a good understanding of the analog computation mechanisms and could tamper with the ISC device, potentially allowing for manipulation, inference, or extraction of sensitive data. This work introduces exploitable backdoors in ISC that encode the output of the analog computation unit to create covert channels. Through theoretical modeling and empirical case studies, we investigate two ISC-specific covert channels: a logic covert channel and a frequency covert channel. These channels are established by deliberately manipulating the analog computation unit co-integrated with sensing materials on a shared substrate, thereby enabling adversaries to exfiltrate sensitive information, posing substantial threats to the security and privacy of real-world ISC applications.