BitDance: Manipulating UART Serial Communication with IEMI

Wired serial communication protocols such as UART are widely used in today's IoT systems for their simple connection and good industry ecology. However, due to the simplicity of these protocols, they are vulnerable to attacks that falsify the communication. In this work, we propose the BitDance attack that can arbitrarily flip the bits of serial communication without any physical contact utilizing intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI). We describe the physical process of how electromagnetic interference influences the voltage, build up a model to demonstrate the bit-level control principle of our work, and implement the attack on 6 different sensors with UART, a widely used serial communication protocol. The result shows we can inject bit-level information and disable legitimate communication from the system with a maximum success rate of 45.4% and 100%. Finally, we propose countermeasures to mitigate the impact of this attack.