Hardening ROS via Hardware-assisted Trusted Execution Environment

Abstract

In recent years, humanoid robots have become quite ubiquitous finding wide applicability in many different fields, spanning from education to entertainment and assistance. They can be considered as more complex cyber-physical systems (CPS) and, as such, they are exposed to the same vulnerabilities. This can be very dangerous for people acting that close with these robots, since attackers by exploiting their vulnerabilities, can not only violate people's privacy, but, more importantly, they can command the robot behavior causing them bodily harm, thus leading to devastating consequences. In this paper, we propose a solution not yet investigated in this field, which relies on the use of secure enclaves, which in our opinion could represent a valuable solution for coping with most of the possible attacks, while suggesting developers to adopt such a precaution during the robot design phase.