Increasing ROS 1.x communication security for medical surgery robot

Abstract

Robot systems based on ROS are growing in popularity. While they are vulnerable from a cybersecurity perspective, they still provide a solid framework for many research projects. The components can easily communicate with each other, share information and send control commands freely and without major restrictions. In special fields (medical, military, etc.) such freedom is dangerous and not acceptable. To foster the application of ROS in medical research field we are hardening its internal architecture and elevate the software security. In this paper we propose an application layer solution for the dataflow control and protection between the nodes.