Biblio
The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a widely adopted standard robotic middleware. However, its preliminary design is devoid of any network security features. Military grade unmanned systems must be guarded against network threats. ROS 2 is built upon the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard and is designed to provide solutions to identified ROS 1 security vulnerabilities by incorporating authentication, encryption, and process profile features, which rely on public key infrastructure. The Department of Defense is looking to use ROS 2 for its military-centric robotics platform. This paper seeks to demonstrate that ROS 2 and its DDS security architecture can serve as a functional platform for use in military grade unmanned systems, particularly in unmanned Naval aerial swarms. In this paper, we focus on the viability of ROS 2 to safeguard communications between swarms and a ground control station (GCS). We test ROS 2's ability to mitigate and withstand certain cyber threats, specifically that of rogue nodes injecting unauthorized data and accessing services that will disable parts of the UAV swarm. We use the Gazebo robotics simulator to target individual UAVs to ascertain the effectiveness of our attack vectors under specific conditions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ROS 2 in mitigating the chosen attack vectors but observed a measurable operational delay within our simulations.
Tactical wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are deployed over a region of interest for mission centric operations. The sink node in a tactical WSN is the aggregation point of data processing. Due to its essential role in the network, the sink node is a high priority target for an attacker who wishes to disable a tactical WSN. This paper focuses on the mitigation of sink-node vulnerability in a tactical WSN. Specifically, we study the issue of protecting the sink node through a technique known as k-anonymity. To achieve k-anonymity, we use a specific routing protocol designed to work within the constraints of WSN communication protocols, specifically IEEE 802.15.4. We use and modify the Lightweight Ad hoc On-Demand Next Generation (LOADng) reactive-routing protocol to achieve anonymity. This modified LOADng protocol prevents an attacker from identifying the sink node without adding significant complexity to the regular sensor nodes. We simulate the modified LOADng protocol using a custom-designed simulator in MATLAB. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol and also show some of the performance tradeoffs that come with this method.