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Abstract

We present RIPA, to our knowledge, the first systematic multi-channel empirical study of prompt injection attacks delivered through the sensory pipeline of a ROS 2-based LLM-controlled robotic system. Across 100 independent runs per injection variant on five LLMs spanning four model families and parameter scales from 4B to 284B (DeepSeek-V4-Flash, Llama3-8B-Instruct-Lite, Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Turbo, Qwen 2.5-7BInstruct-Turbo, Gemma-3n-E4B), we identify model-specific vulnerability profiles that do not follow a monotonic scaling trend: Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Turbo exhibits a 100% attack success rate (ASR) across all injection variants, while Llama-3-8B-Instruct-Lite and Qwen 2.5-7B-Instruct-Turbo resist direct-override injection (0% ASR), and the smallest model evaluated (Gemma-3n-E4B, 4B) matches the 70B models vulnerability profileindicating that robustness is model-specific rather than scale-dependent. We propose a hybrid semantic firewall that achieves 0% ASR against known injection patterns with no false positives on a preliminary benign set (0/20 commands) but exhibits a 10.2% trialweighted bypass rate (58/570 trials; N = 30 per payload across 19 obfuscation payloads) against adversarially obfuscated attacks, exposing a critical gap between rule-based and semantic defense layers. We further introduce three sensory injection channels: visual (Channel 1, via OCR), audio (Channel 2, via Whisper STT), and LiDAR sensor context poisoning (Channel 3). We show that Channel 3, which injects fabricated obstacle data into the robot environment-state representation at the LLM system-prompt level, achieves 100% ASR across all variants on DeepSeek-V4Flash. We also contribute a firewall bypass taxonomy spanning 19 obfuscation payloads across five categories. All code, data, and results are publicly available.