Biblio

Robotic systems are becoming an ever-increasing part of everyday life due to their capacity to carry out physical tasks on behalf of human beings. Found in nearly every facet of our lives, robotic systems are used domestically, in small and large-scale factories, for the production and processing of agriculture, for military operations, to name a few. The Robotic Operating System (ROS) is the standard operating system used today for the development of modular robotic systems. However, in its development, ROS has been notorious for the absence of security mechanisms, placing people in danger both physically and digitally. This dissertation summary presents the development of a suite of ROS tools, leading up to the development of a modular, secure framework for ROS. An integrated approach for the security of ROS-enabled robotic systems is described, to set a baseline for the continual development to increase ROS security. The work culminates in the ROS security tool ROS-Immunity, combining internal system defense, external system verification, and automated vulnerability detection in an integrated tool that, in conjunction with Secure-ROS, provides a suite of defenses for ROS systems against malicious attackers.

In this paper we propose ROS-Defender, a holistic approach to secure robotics systems, which integrates a Security Event Management System (SIEM), an intrusion prevention system (IPS) and a firewall for a robotic system. ROS-Defender combines anomaly detection systems at application (ROS) level and network level, with dynamic policy enforcement points using software defined networking (SDN) to provide protection against a large class of attacks. Although SIEMs, IPS, and firewall have been previously used to secure computer networks, ROSDefender is applying them for the specific use case of robotic systems, where security is in many cases an afterthought.