Publications & research notes

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 rob

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

Robots are quickly becoming the tools we deploy to act upon the world — yet they are being built with little regard for security. This review argues that in robotics, security is a prerequisite for sa

Hardware teardown is a well-established practice in security research but under-applied to robots. This work argues that tearing robots down — physically and logically — is essential to assess their s

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 se

Robots sit at the boundary of IT and operational technology (OT), where traditional endpoint defenses do not fit. This work presents an approach to protect robot endpoints inside OT networks without b

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 — t

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 g

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, disc

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 wor

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

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 fac

General-purpose severity scores (CVSS) miss what makes robots dangerous: physical consequence, safety impact and environmental context. The Robot Vulnerability Scoring System (RVSS) extends CVSS with

aztarna is a footprinting tool for robotics that scans the Internet for exposed robots and robot components — ROS masters, SROS setups, industrial routers and more — quantifying just how many robots a

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 applicat

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 a

We propose a robot cybersecurity methodology to secure computational graphs and improve SROS2, usable security tools for ROS 2. We argue that without usability, security in robotics will be greatly im

Learn robot cybersecurity through the Robot Hacking Manual (RHM), an introductory series about cybersecurity in robotics, with an attempt to provide comprehensive case studies and step-by-step tutoria

We study the underlying default communication middleware of ROS 2, OMG's Data Distribution Service (DDS) and 6 popular implementations. We found all DDS implementations vulnerable to various attacks a

The Robot Hacking Manual (RHM) is an introductory series about cybersecurity for robots, with an attempt to provide comprehensive case studies and step-by-step tutorials with the intent to raise aware

What's the status of cybersecurity in robotics? and, how can we best improve cyber-resillience in robotics? In this article we answer these questions and review the status of the robot cybersecurity a

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 to

This article discusses briefly the connection between safety and security in robotics, while reasons about how security must be implemented at the robot endpoint to fullfil safety requirements.

Can ROS be used securely for industrial use cases even though its origins didn't consider it? The present study answers this question experimentally by performing a red team exercise over ROS and ROS-

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

A total of 23 robot cybersecurity vulnerabilities were reported from May to June 2020 according to the Robot Vulnerability Database (RVD). Vulnerabilities reported affect different vendors however a s

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

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

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…

The robotics air gap is a network security measure employed wherein the robot is assumed to be physically isolated from insecure networks. Robots however are networks of devices by definition. Network

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…

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.

Universal Robots delivers unprotected Intellectual Property through their insecure development platform, Universal Robots+. More than 600 partners affected have already submitted their Plug-and-Produc

Tenths of thousands of users of Universal Robots are using insecure technology that might easily lead to safety hazards. This article argues about why and how we reached this situation and proposes s

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