As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly deployed as embodied agents such as drones, robots, and uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS), their attack surface extends beyond software into the physical world. These systems tightly integrate perception, learning, decision-making, and control, creating security risks that are poorly addressed by traditional cybersecurity or AI robustness techniques. This talk presents recent work on Embodied AI Security, focusing on two complementary efforts: CHAI (IEEE SaTML 2026), which studies command hijacking attacks against embodied agents that use large (vision) language models for high-level reasoning, and BADControl (to be presented at USENIX Security 2026), which examines backdoor and manipulation attacks on low-level controllers such as Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) and Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). Together, these projects demonstrate how adversaries can exploit the interface between cognition and control to induce unsafe or mission-failing behaviors throughsmall, targeted perturbations. The talk concludes by discussing open challenges and outlining a research agenda for principled defenses that span sensing, decision-making, and control in autonomous systems, and how to defend against cheap but sophisticated drone swarms.
Alvaro Cardenas is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz. Before joining UCSC, he was the Eugene McDermott Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research staff member at Fujitsu Laboratories. He hold M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a B.S. from Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. His research focuses on the security of cyber-physical systems, including embodied AI, autonomous vehicles, and counter drones technologies with non-kinetic means.
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