Analyzing Security Vulnerability and Forensic Investigation of ROS2: A Case Study

Abstract

For several years, robotics technology has used ROS (Robot Operating System) as a middleware application for operating robots. The adoption of robots in various domains such as defense, industrial, academia, healthcare, and many more are rising gradually. After the market demand rose, ROS was upgraded to ROS2 for better performance and security. However, researchers have identified many security issues and breaches in the ROS2 framework. However, security is the biggest issue in today's era. Thus the security issue is unrestricted in the robotics domains, which can cause human loss, injuries to humans and destruction of internal/external environments. In this paper, we demonstrate the security vulnerabilities of ROS2-based applications, such as the unauthorized injection of the data, unauthorized access to the data and denial of service attacks. Nevertheless, anti-forensic techniques on ROS2-based applications were performed to obstruct the forensics investigation. After that, we forensic investigated the attacks performed on the ROS2-based application. Our result shows that it is possible to compromise ROS2-based applications and attackers can crash the ROS2 system quickly. In a forensic investigation, it is possible to identify the attacker's IP address, mac address, network interface and the process of the ROS2 system running on the robot. The authors stated the limitations and future work of the ROS2-based application in forensic investigation.