technical report · 2021
Abstract. 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 breaking real-time behavior or safety.
Robots straddle IT and OT: they run rich software yet control physical processes under real-time and safety constraints. Off-the-shelf endpoint agents can violate those constraints, so protection must be purpose-built.
Latency budgets and safety certifications constrain what defenses may run on a robot.
The proposed endpoint protection observes and constrains robot behavior with minimal overhead, catching compromise while preserving determinism — the trade-off that makes robot endpoint security uniquely hard.