Robot cybersecurity papers, data and research notes.https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/2026-07-14T00:00:00ZCybersecurity Roboticshttps://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/certifying-ghosts/2026-07-08T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

The EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA, Regulation (EU) 2024/2847) makes a smart bet: it does not demand that products be free of vulnerabilities, a promise no software can keep, but only that manufacturers run a process — assess risk, handle flaws, ship updates.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/spoofing-the-senses/2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

A robot senses the world, then acts — so the most fundamental attack skips the software entirely and lies to the sensors themselves.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/phoning-home/2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Every modern robot keeps an always-on connection to its maker — for telemetry, remote management, over-the-air updates and cloud teleoperation. That convenience turns the manufacturer backend into a single, remote, always-connected attack surface for the entire fleet.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/hardening-a-robot/2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

This lab spends most of its time showing how robots break. This briefing is the counterweight: the concrete, mostly-free controls that actually hold a robot — SROS2 and DDS-Security on the graph, segmentation and a host firewall on the network, signed updates and secure boot on the supply chain…

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/hacking-consumer-robots-ai-era/2026-03-09T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Is robot cybersecurity broken by AI? Consumer robots -- from autonomous lawnmowers to powered exoskeletons and window cleaners -- are rapidly entering homes and workplaces, yet their security remains rooted in assumptions of specialized attacker expertise.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/foundation-model-robots/2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

As robots hand control to large language and vision–language–action models, the reasoning loop itself becomes attackable.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/caibench-cybersecurity-ai-benchmark/2025-10-28T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Cybersecurity spans multiple interconnected domains, complicating the development of meaningful, labor-relevant benchmarks. Existing benchmarks assess isolated skills rather than integrated performance.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/cybersecurity-of-a-humanoid-robot/2025-09-17T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

As humanoids move from demos to deployments, we assess the cybersecurity of a commercial humanoid robot and find encryption flaws and unauthorized telemetry — showing that the newest, most capable robots inherit the field's oldest mistakes.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/humanoids-as-attack-vectors/2025-09-17T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

We show that a commercial humanoid (Unitree G1) can be repurposed as a surveillance and cyber-operations platform: a mobile sensor suite with network access that an attacker can weaponize against the environments it is invited into.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/offensive-robot-cybersecurity/2025-06-18T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Robots, integral to modern automation and services, encounter formidable cybersecurity challenges, primarily due to their inherent complexity and the lack of vendor accountability for security, shifting the burden to end-users.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/cai-bug-bounty-cybersecurity-ai/2025-04-08T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

By 2028 most cybersecurity actions will be autonomous, with humans teleoperating. We present the first classification of autonomy levels in cybersecurity and introduce Cybersecurity AI (CAI), an open-source framework that democratizes advanced security testing through specialized AI agents.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/sros2-security-tools-for-ros2/2022-10-23T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Security in ROS 2 is only effective if developers actually use it. SROS2 provides a usable set of tools and a methodology to secure ROS 2 computational graphs, lowering the friction of enabling DDS security so that robots ship encrypted and authenticated by default.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/sros2-cyber-security-tools-for-ros-2/2022-03-17T09:09:38Z2022-03-17T09:09:38Z

SROS2 is a developer toolset to secure ROS 2 computational graphs in usable manner. We improve and propose a robot cybersecurity methodology around SROS2.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/robot-teardown/2022-01-23T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Building a robot requires careful selection of components that interact across networks while meeting timing deadlines. Given the complexity associated, as robots get damaged or security compromised, their components will increasingly require updates and replacements.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/robot-cybersecurity-a-review/2022-01-23T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Robots are often shipped insecure and in some cases fully unprotected. The rationale behind is threefold: first, defensive security mechanisms for robots are still on their early stages, not covering the complete threat landscape.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/robot-hacking-manual-rhm-v0-4/2021-12-13T07:00:32Z2021-12-13T07:00:32Z

Learn robot cybersecurity through the Robot Hacking Manual (RHM), an introductory series about cybersecurity in robotics.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/hacking-ros-2/2021-11-28T05:41:40Z2021-11-28T05:41:40Z

We study the ROS 2 communications through OMG's Data Distribution Service (DDS) and found all DDS implementations vulnerable to various attacks.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/robot-hacking-manual/2021-11-25T08:00:11Z2021-11-25T08:00:11Z

An introductory series about cybersecurity for robots with an attempt to provide comprehensive case studies and step-by-step tutorials.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/cybersecurity-in-robotics-quantitative/2021-08-16T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

A book-length treatment of robot cybersecurity: the challenges that make robots hard to secure, quantitative models for reasoning about robot risk, and the practices — disclosure, scoring, testing — that move the field forward.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/robot-cybersecurity-a-review/2021-07-24T15:00:47Z2021-07-24T15:00:47Z

What's the status of cybersecurity in robotics? how can we improve cyber-resillience of robots? This article reviews the status of the robot cybersecurity.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/robot-teardown/2021-07-18T09:50:54Z2021-07-18T09:50:54Z

Robot teardown fuels security research by understanding the underlying robot hardware architectures. The results help uncover security vulnerabilities, research quality and safety. We introduce the topic and motivation, while analyzing the robots of Teradyne.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/securing-robots-in-ot-environments/2020-11-16T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Are robot endpoints secure in industrial environments? Current industrial security solutions monitor network interaction and detect unexpected traffic and cyber-threats, but robot-specific protocols and tools are commonly unknown to them, and most robots are fully exposed to simple attacks.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/safety-and-security-standards-for-robots/2020-11-02T14:49:56Z2020-11-02T14:49:56Z

Safety and security are connected in robotics. We reason about how security must be implemented at the robot endpoint to fullfil safety requirements.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/alurity-robot-cybersecurity-toolbox/2020-10-15T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Reproducibility is the bottleneck in robot security research. alurity is a modular, containerized toolbox that packages the tools and targets needed to research, teach and reproduce robot security work in a consistent environment.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/red-teaming-the-ros-in-industry/2020-09-17T17:57:05Z2020-09-17T17:57:05Z

Can ROS be used securely for industrial use cases even though its origins didn't consider it? We answer this question experimentally via red teaming.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/red-teaming-ros-industrial/2020-09-17T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

We red-team ROS and ROS-Industrial deployments as an attacker would, chaining reconnaissance, protocol abuse and lateral movement to take control of industrial robots — and derive concrete hardening guidance from what worked.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/disrupting-ros-communications-by-attacking-underlying-network-protocols/2020-08-24T18:13:53Z2020-08-24T18:13:53Z

We illustrate the consequences that some simple attacks targeting these underlying network protocols could have in ROS and ROS-Industrial deployments.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/monthly-reports-on-robot-cybersecurity-vulnerabilities-may-and-june-2020/2020-07-10T06:45:15Z2020-07-10T06:45:15Z

A total of 23 robot cybersecurity vulnerabilities were reported from May to June 2020 affecting Mobile Industrial Robots among other vendors.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/it-ot-iot-and-robotics-security-comparison/2020-06-23T08:37:48Z2020-06-23T08:37:48Z

Cyber security aspects that apply to different domains including IT, OT, IoT or robotics are analyzed and compared together.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/a-compromised-supply-chain-of-robots/2020-05-31T17:53:54Z2020-05-31T17:53:54Z

Insecurities in robotics are not just in the robots themselves, they are also in the supply chain, difficulting serving safe and secure robotics solutions.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/vulnerability-coordination-and-disclosure-in-robotics/2020-05-17T11:48:11Z2020-05-17T11:48:11Z

As nicely pointed out in [1], responsible cybersecurity research and more specifically, vulnerability disclosure, is a two-way street. Vendors and manufacturers[2], as well as…

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/the-robotics-air-gap/2020-05-08T21:45:00Z2020-05-08T21:45:00Z

The robotics air gap is a network security measure employed wherein the robot is assumed to be physically isolated from insecure networks.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/companies-use-vulnerable-collaborative-robots/2020-05-06T05:00:00Z2020-05-06T05:00:00Z

More than 100 companies are using insecure collaborative robots putting at risk tenths of thousands of workers and infrastructures around the world. These insecurities stem from…

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/robot-cybersecurity-vulnerabilities-april-2020/2020-05-03T16:02:57Z2020-05-03T16:02:57Z

A total of 67 robot cybersecurity flaws were reported in April 2020 according to the Robot Vulnerability Database (RVD), all of them vulnerabilities applying and confirmed to Universal Robots.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/universal-robots-ip-disclosure-insecure-exfiltration/2020-04-26T21:25:39Z2020-04-26T21:25:39Z

Universal Robots delivers unprotected Intellectual Property through their insecure development platform, Universal Robots+. More than 600 partners affected.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/security-universal-robots/2020-04-19T15:11:32Z2020-04-19T15:11:32Z

Tenths of thousands of users of Universal Robots are using insecure technology. This article argues about this situation and proposes some thoughts.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/quality-safety-security-robotics/2020-04-13T14:13:41Z2020-04-13T14:13:41Z

Quality, safety and security are often misunderstood, mistaken or disregarded in robotics. This article argues about these terms and their relationship.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/devsecops-in-robotics/2020-03-23T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Robots are long-lived, safety-critical and frequently updated — exactly the systems that benefit most from continuous security. This work adapts DevSecOps to robotics, embedding security testing, disclosure and patching into the robot software lifecycle.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/robot-vulnerability-database-rvd/2019-12-24T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

The Robot Vulnerability Database (RVD) is an open, community-driven archive that registers and records robot vulnerabilities and bugs. It gives the field a shared, machine-readable memory of what has gone wrong, scored with RVSS and mapped to affected vendors, components and robots.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/akerbeltz-industrial-robot-ransomware/2019-12-16T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Akerbeltz is, to our knowledge, the first ransomware built for industrial collaborative robots. Demonstrated against Universal Robots' UR3, UR5 and UR10 cobots, it shows how an attacker can hold a factory's robots — and therefore its production — hostage.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/real-time-security-for-robotics/2019-11-07T08:57:27Z2019-11-07T08:57:27Z

Real-time robot security means preserving control deadlines under attack — across hardware, networking, ROS 2, synchronization and security controls.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/aztarna-robot-footprinting/2018-12-22T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Industry 4.0 is changing the commonly held assumption that robots are deployed in closed, isolated networks.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/robotics-ctf/2018-10-01T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

You learn security by breaking things safely. The Robotics CTF (RCTF) is an online capture-the-flag environment of vulnerable robot scenarios, letting researchers and students practice robot hacking and defense reproducibly.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/rvss-robot-vulnerability-scoring-system/2018-07-26T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

General-purpose severity scores (CVSS) miss what makes robots dangerous: physical consequence, safety impact and environmental context.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/robot-hazards-safety-to-security/2018-06-11T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Robotics landscape is experiencing big changes. Robots are spreading and will soon be everywhere. Systems traditionally employed in industry are being replaced by collaborative robots, while more and more professional and consumer robots are introduced in people's daily activities.

https://cybersecurityrobotics.com/research/robot-security-framework/2018-06-11T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

Robot security assessments are often ad hoc and incomparable. The Robot Security Framework (RSF) proposes a systematic, layered methodology — physical, network, firmware, operating-system and application — so assessments are structured, repeatable and comparable across robots.