Interesting research: “CHAI: Command Hijacking Against Embodied AI.”

Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyond training distributions and adapt to novel real-world situations. These capabilities, however, also create new security risks. In this paper, we introduce CHAI (Command Hijacking against embodied AI), a new class of prompt-based attacks that exploit the multimodal language interpretation abilities of Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs). CHAI embeds deceptive natural language instructions, such as misleading signs, in visual input, systematically searches the token space, builds a dictionary of prompts, and guides an attacker model to generate Visual Attack Prompts. We evaluate CHAI on four LVLM agents; drone emergency landing, autonomous driving, and aerial object tracking, and on a real robotic vehicle. Our experiments show that CHAI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art attacks. By exploiting the semantic and multimodal reasoning strengths of next-generation embodied AI systems, CHAI underscores the urgent need for defenses that extend beyond traditional adversarial robustness.

News article.

British defence firms have reportedly warned staff not to connect their phones to Chinese-made EVs

Mobile phones and desktop computers are longstanding targets for cyber spies – but how vulnerable are electric cars?

On Monday the i newspaper claimed that British defence firms working for the UK government have warned staff against connecting or pairing their phones with Chinese-made electric cars, due to fears that Beijing could extract sensitive data from the devices.