On the Security of Robotic Applications Using ROS

Abstract

The increasing incidence of robots in our society is evident due to the recent advances in the areas of robotics and artificial intelligence. Naturally, this raises the concern of security. Robots that share the environment with humans, need to be intrinsically secure to avoid compromising human physical and data integrity. However, robot cybersecurity is not commonly considered a key area under focus by the research community, despite being vital in several application fields. This chapter discusses security concerns in ROS, the most adopted middleware for robotics, and presents, analyzes, and compares several existing initiatives for securing robot applications in ROS. Results demonstrate important breakthroughs within this domain, room for improvement in the design of robotic solutions regarding cybersecurity, and highlight the need to mature the industry security principles to avoid the penetration of insecure robots into the market.