An Emerging Threat: Eve Meets a Robot

A Perspective of Security for Mobile Service Robots

“…Typically, these safety Threat Tools Defence Mechanisms Attacks on Sensor Data Side-Channel attacks (active&passive) Anti-Virus [24,15,6,25,16,26,13,16] Intrusion Detection System Hardware Attacks [13,17] Redundancy, Diversity Man In the Middle [27] Electro-Magnetic Shielding Encryption Authentication Attacks on Hardware Physical Manipulation [20] Device Signatures Hardware Trojan [28,19] Authentication Hardware Testing Formal Verification Attacks on Software Malware [9,22,23] Anti-Virus Denial of Service [23,24] Hardening (IDS,Firewall, etc.) Phishing [22] No external hardware interfaces Vigilance Software Testing Security Updates Authentication & Access-Control Attacks on Infrastructure Standard Password [9] Anti-Virus Man In The Middle [6,9] Authentication & Access Control Encryption Table 2: Examples of tools and defence mechanisms for our Threat Vectors mechanisms do not take into account active attackers [5] and manufacturers are negligent or might not be aware of the fact that side-channel attacks [23] also apply to robots. These attacks have the potential to leak sensitive information and can even cause environmental harm.…”

“…Attacking the sensors of this autonomous MSR could lead to privacy issues or to accidents like in [11] where a safety failure resulted in an accident which included a child. We picked four of the most interesting active-side channel sensor attacks and refer to the literature for passive side-channel attacks and more examples [5,22,23,29,30]. …”

“…Securing hardware from side-channel attacks is a difficult and important problem. Especially for robots, where control-loops typically rely on the correctness of input sensor data [5]. Aside from clever prevention and detection mechanisms, a fail-safe mode should be implemented if the ongoing attack is found to be too severe.…”

“…To prevent information leakage from EM radiation, Akdemir et al propose EM shielding [5] which can be applied to the whole robot or only to individual components. Furthermore, solutions known from other cryptographic devices such as noise generators, masking techniques, etc., can be applied [15].…”

“…The robot's main system has to interconnect with all its hardware devices and has to ensure their concurrent functioning. The requirement of reliable, concurrent hardware access with real time constraints makes the design and implementation of such systems an extremely hard task [5].…”