  The polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can be used to
search for parity-violating processes like that predicted by a Chern-Simons
coupling to a light pseudoscalar field. Such an interaction rotates $E$ modes
into $B$ modes in the observed CMB signal by an effect known as cosmic
birefringence. Even though isotropic birefringence can be confused with the
rotation produced by a miscalibration of the detectors' polarization angles the
degeneracy between both effects is broken when Galactic foreground emission is
used as a calibrator. In this work, we use realistic simulations of the
High-Frequency Instrument of the Planck mission to test the impact that
Galactic foreground emission and instrumental systematics have on the recent
birefringence measurements obtained through this technique. Our results
demonstrate the robustness of the methodology against the miscalibration of
polarization angles and other systematic effects, like
intensity-to-polarization leakage, beam leakage, or cross-polarization effects.
However, our estimator is sensitive to the $EB$ correlation of polarized
foreground emission. Here we propose to correct the bias induced by dust $EB$
by modeling the foreground signal with templates produced in Bayesian
component-separation analyses that fit parametric models to CMB data.
Acknowledging the limitations of currently available dust templates like that
of the Commander sky model, high-precision CMB data and a characterization of
dust beyond the modified blackbody paradigm are needed to obtain a definitive
measurement of cosmic birefringence in the future.
