arXiv · 2022
Abstract. 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 security, to enable repair and to fight programmed obsolescence, using Universal Robots and Mobile Industrial Robots hardware as case studies.
You cannot secure what you cannot inspect. Teardown exposes the boards, buses, firmware and trust boundaries a vendor's datasheet hides, revealing debug ports, unauthenticated update paths and hard-coded secrets.
Teardown also has an economic dimension: it enables independent repair and counters vendor-imposed obsolescence.
Across the studied cobots and mobile robots we recovered firmware, identified insecure boot and update mechanisms, and demonstrated that physical access rapidly escalates to full control — a property that matters because robots live in shared physical spaces.
The methodology generalizes: photograph, identify components, dump firmware, map communications, and correlate with the software attack surface.