Cyber security of robots: A comprehensive survey

Abstract

The use of robots in the modern world is widespread, not only in medicine and automated vehicles, but also in national security, defense, and industry. Together with the growing number of robots there is also an increase of cyber attacks against robots and in general of their security issues. Thus, we consider cyber security and related issues such as robots vulnerabilities from different perspectives that need to be investigated in order to understand strengths and weaknesses of robots. The aim of this paper is to cover the topic of cyber security in robots in a more focused and comprehensive way with respect to what has been done previously in literature. Throughout our comprehensive survey, we discuss also different aspects related to threats, attacks, and available methods for preventing malicious behavior from robots. As a result of our investigation, it has been found that robots' data, software, network, and hardware are the most vulnerable components. During this review, eventually current approaches to protect robots are discussed in order to maintain their integrity, availability, and confidentiality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the likelihood of cyber security risks on robotic platforms can be significantly reduced through improvements in encryption, authorization/authentication, and physical security. Security level of different robotic systems is analyzed in different fields so as to determine whether the security needs to be upgraded or rectified. We also present and describe open challenges that can arise in the next few years. This paper aims at being a starting point for researchers and practitioners to understand and upgrade the cyber security of robots.

Keywords

• Cyber security
• ROS
• Robot forensics
• DoS