Robots are the most critical cybersecurity frontier.
A compromised server leaks data. A compromised robot can kill — it welds, lifts, drives, or operates on a patient. Security flaws become safety risks in robotics. Below, we quantify how fast that frontier is widening, using the world's robot-vulnerability records.
≈ one new robot vulnerability disclosed every 4 days over the last three years — and the pace is rising.
The humanoid frontier
A commercial humanoid — the Unitree G1 — was shown to hand an attacker root access over Bluetooth, ship static cryptographic keys, and stream telemetry to overseas servers: a helper turned into a mobile surveillance and cyber-operations platform. This is where robot cybersecurity stops being theoretical.
The cybersecurity of a humanoid ↗ Humanoids as attack vectors ↗
A cyberattack that ends in the physical world
Robot intrusions follow the classic attack lifecycle — with two robotics twists. Many robots grant root on first access, so the privilege-escalation step simply vanishes; and the chain doesn't end in stolen data. It ends in actuation — a machine that welds, lifts or drives. That is why we treat every robot security flaw as a safety defect.
Stages after the Cyber Kill Chain and the ROS 2 threat model; robot techniques drawn from the Akerbeltz ransomware and humanoid case studies.The robot's brain is now an attack surface
As robots hand control to foundation models, the attack surface moves into the reasoning loop. A manipulated image, a few injected words, or a poisoned policy no longer just leaks data — it becomes physical action. Jailbreaks like RoboPAIR drive language-controlled robots to unsafe behaviour; adversarial vision derails vision-language-action models; and a 1–5 word "safety" phrase can halt a robot outright — a semantic denial-of-service.
Read the briefing: Foundation-model robots ↗
After SoK: Security & Privacy of Foundation-Model-Powered Robots (2026), RoboPAIR, and recent VLA / prompt-injection / semantic-DoS research. This is where robot cybersecurity is heading next.Robot vulnerabilities over time
New disclosures per year (bars) and the cumulative total (line), aggregated across sources.
Sources: RVD, NVD (robot keywords) & EUVD — 547 records, deduplicated by CVE.Severity distribution
Robot vulnerabilities by CVSS / RVSS severity band.
Severity from source metadata (NVD CVSS, RVD RVSS, EUVD base score).Coverage by source
This lab does not rely on any single database — it fuses several, the way zerodayclock.com does for IT, but focused on robots.
RVD (github.com/aliasrobotics/rvd) · NVD (nvd.nist.gov) · EUVD (euvd.enisa.europa.eu) · CISA KEV cross-referenced.Why robots are different
In IT, the worst case is data loss. In robotics, the worst case is a machine that hurts someone. Robots fuse IT, OT and IoT attack surfaces and add actuation, so the same bug class carries far more consequence — which is why we treat every robot security flaw as a safety defect.
See Reviewing the status of robot cybersecurity, Safety requires security in robotics, and the Milestones of how the threat escalated.
Explore all 547 vulnerabilities →The window to patch is closing
Across all software, the median time from a vulnerability going public to its first exploitation in the wild has collapsed from 771 days in 2018 to same-day by 2025 — a 99.9% fall. A server can be patched inside that window; a fleet of certified, safety-critical robots — often offline for months, expensive to recertify — cannot. As exploitation turns instant, the machines that move inherit the sharpest end of it.
Median time-to-exploit, industry-wide: EUVD disclosure dates cross-referenced with CISA KEV exploitation records, 2018–2026; exponential fit R²=0.98. Motif after zerodayclock.com.Most affected manufacturers
Which robot manufacturers appear most across the aggregated records — a rough map of where hardware risk concentrates. Middleware (ROS, DDS) is tracked separately.
Vendor inferred from RVD labels and NVD/EUVD descriptions; 377/547 records attributed.Security is becoming a legal requirement
Regulators and standards bodies are catching up fast — and they now encode this lab's thesis. ISO 10218:2025 folds a mandatory cybersecurity risk assessment into robot functional safety, and the EU Cyber Resilience Act makes secure-by-design binding for any product with digital elements. In robotics, a security flaw is now — in law — a safety defect.
EU CRA (Reg. 2024/2847): obligations from 11 Sep 2026, full application 11 Dec 2027 · ISO 10218-1/-2:2025 (in force Apr 2025) references IEC TS 63074 → IEC 62443.