Robotics cyber security: vulnerabilities, attacks, countermeasures, and recommendations

Abstract

The recent digital revolution led robots to become integrated more than ever into different domains such as agricultural, medical, industrial, military, police (law enforcement), and logistics. Robots are devoted to serve, facilitate, and enhance the human life. However, many incidents have been occurring, leading to serious injuries and devastating impacts such as the unnecessary loss of human lives. Unintended accidents will always take place, but the ones caused by malicious attacks represent a very challenging issue. This includes maliciously hijacking and controlling robots and causing serious economic and financial losses. This paper reviews the main security vulnerabilities, threats, risks, and their impacts, and the main security attacks within the robotics domain. In this context, different approaches and recommendations are presented in order to enhance and improve the security level of robotic systems such as multi-factor device/user authentication schemes, in addition to multi-factor cryptographic algorithms. We also review the recently presented security solutions for robotic systems.

The Cybersecurity and the Care Robots: A Viewpoint on the Open Problems and the Perspectives

“…The recent review in [ 21 ] highlighted how CS experience in IPCS robotics is exportable to the world of CRs. The same authors highlighted models and types of cyber-attacks on the CRs.…”

“…Much of the experience in robotics [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ] on physiological harms/damages can be exported to CRs. Indeed, in [ 21 ] a process of unification has been carried out, which has general validity. Figure 2 summarizes the different robot-related threats, their causes, and their consequences in the case of the CRs.…”

“…The Attacks can be arranged into three categories [ 21 ]: ATTACKs on the hardware, ATTACKs on firmware, ATTACKs on the communication. In the following, we summarize these categories in brief.…”

“…These ATTACKs [ 21 ] vary from hardware Trojans up to phishing [ 63 ]. They allow the aggressor to create passages to gain unauthorized access up a full control [ 21 , 64 ]. In some cases, they can even have a full access to the hardware.…”

Switching Towards a Proactive Grid Based Data Management Approach

“…The research proposed begins with a comprehensive understanding of HADOOP and HDFS working processes to develop an algorithm which is applicable and applicable [8]. To create an algorithm that is relevant and implementable, the performance is evaluated on a tiny cluster to control data transfers and therefore demonstrate the efficiency of the method even on a small scaled of HDFS [9].…”