security

Cybersecurity in Robotics: Challenges, Quantitative Modeling, and Practice

Robotics is becoming more and more ubiquitous, but the pressure to bring systems to market occasionally goes at the cost of neglecting security mechanisms during the development, deployment or while in production. As a result, contemporary robotic systems are vulnerable to diverse attack patterns, and an a posteriori hardening is at least challenging, if not impossible at all. This book aims to stipulate the inclusion of security in robotics from the earliest design phases onward and with a special focus on the cost-benefit tradeoff that can otherwise be an inhibitor for the fast development of affordable systems. We advocate quantitative methods of security management and design, covering vulnerability scoring systems tailored to robotic systems, and accounting for the highly distributed nature of robots as an interplay of potentially very many components. A powerful quantitative approach to model-based security is offered by game theory, providing a rich spectrum of techniques to optimize security against various kinds of attacks. Such a multi-perspective view on security is necessary to address the heterogeneity and complexity of robotic systems. This book is intended as an accessible starter for the theoretician and practitioner working in the field.

A Cryptography-Powered Infrastructure to Ensure the Integrity of Robot Workflows

With the growing popularity of robots, the development of robot applications is subject to an ever increasing number of additional requirements from e.g., safety, legal and ethical sides. The certification of an application for compliance to such requirements is an essential step in the development of a robot program. However, at this point in time it must be ensured that the integrity of this program is preserved meaning that no intentional or unintentional modifications happen to the program until the robot executes it. Based on the abstraction of robot programs as workflows we present in this work a cryptography-powered distributed infrastructure for the preservation of robot workflows. A client composes a robot program and once it is accepted a separate entity provides a digital signature for the workflow and its parameters which can be verified by the robot before executing it. We demonstrate a real-world implementation of this infrastructure using a mobile manipulator and its software stack. We also provide an outlook on the integration of this work into our larger undertaking to provide a distributed ledger-based compliant robot application development environment.

Sichere und zuverlässige mobile Manipulation

Modern robot systems are an essential technology for the digitalization of production and value-adding processes. The goal is to allow machines to operate in a common area with humans in so-called collaborative operation without separation by …

Paper on Visual Sensor Network Threat model published

We have just published our generalized threat model for Visual Sensor Networks.

A generalized Threat Model for Visual Sensor Networks

Today, visual sensor networks (VSNs) are pervasively used in smart environments such as intelligent homes, industrial automation or surveillance. A major concern in the use of sensor networks in general is their reliability in the presence of …

Introducing the Robot Vulnerability Database (RVD)

This paper discusses the need for a specialized vulnerability enumeration for robots and robot components and introduces the Robot Vulnerability Database (RVD)

ERRoSS 2020

I am very happy to co-chair the first International Workshop on Engineering Resilient Robot Software Systems (ERRoSS2020) in November 2020. This workshop is a joint effort with Prof. Martin Pinzger from Klagenfurt University to bring more software engineering and security into the robotics domain. The workshof focuses on building resilient (i.e., secure and well engineered) software to modern robots. Due to the complexity of this field, we expect a wide range of topics from software engineering related work to security.

Penetration testing ROS

ROS is the most popular framework in robotics research and it also grows in terms of industrial use. This makes ROS a worthwhile target for attackers especially since security is not addressed by the core framework itself. Its open architecture and …

Resilient Self-Calibration in Distributed Visual Sensor Networks

Today, camera networks are pervasively used in smart environments such as intelligent homes, industrial automa tion or surveillance. These applications often require cameras to be aware of their spatial neighbors or even to operate on …

Cybersecurity for robotics at ERF2019

A look back on what happened in recent years in ROS security