Biblio

Using multi-UAV systems to accomplish both civil and military missions is becoming a popular trend. With the development of software and hardware technologies, Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now able to operate autonomously at edge. However, the remote control of manned systems, e.g., ground control station (GCS), remains essential to mission success, and the system's control and non-payload communication (CNPC) are facing severe cyber threats caused by smart attacks. To avoid hijacking, in this paper, we propose a secure mechanism that reduces such security risks for multi-UAV systems. We introduce friendly jamming from UAVs to block eavesdropping on the remote control channel. The trade-off between security and energy consumption is optimized by three approaches designed for UAV and GCS under algorithms of different complexities. Numerical results show the approach efficiency under different mission conditions and security demands, and demonstrate the features of the proposed mechanism for various scenarios.

ROS 2 is rapidly becoming a standard in the robotics industry. Built upon DDS as its default communication middleware and used in safety-critical scenarios, adding secu-rity to robots and ROS computational graphs is increasingly becoming a concern. The present work introduces SROS2, a series of developer tools and libraries that facilitate adding security to ROS 2 graphs. Focusing on a usability-centric approach in SROS2, we present a methodology for securing graphs systematically while following the DevSecOps model. We also demonstrate the use of our security tools by presenting an application case study that considers securing a graph using the popular Navigation2 and SLAM Toolbox stacks applied in a TurtieBot3 robot. We analyse the current capabilities of SROS2 and discuss the shortcomings, which provides insights for future contributions and extensions. Ultimately, we present SROS2 as usable security tools for ROS 2 and argue that without usability, security in robotics will be greatly impaired.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a rapidly growing branch of IoT (Internet of Things), which requires special treatment to cyber security due to confidentiality of healthcare data and patient health threat. Healthcare data and automated medical devices might become vulnerable targets of malicious cyber-attacks. While a large number of robotic applications, including medical and healthcare, employ robot operating system (ROS) as their backbone, not enough attention is paid for ROS security. The paper discusses a security of ROS-based swing doors automation in the context of a robotic hospital framework, which should be protected from cyber-attacks.

Systems for relative localization in multi-robot systems based on ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging have recently emerged as robust solutions for GNSS-denied environments. Scalability remains one of the key challenges, particularly in adhoc deployments. Recent solutions include dynamic allocation of active and passive localization modes for different robots or nodes in the system. with larger-scale systems becoming more distributed, key research questions arise in the areas of security and trustability of such localization systems. This paper studies the potential integration of collaborative-decision making processes with distributed ledger technologies. Specifically, we investigate the design and implementation of a methodology for running an UWB role allocation algorithm within smart contracts in a blockchain. In previous works, we have separately studied the integration of ROS2 with the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain, and introduced a new algorithm for scalable UWB-based localization. In this paper, we extend these works by (i) running experiments with larger number of mobile robots switching between different spatial configurations and (ii) integrating the dynamic UWB role allocation algorithm into Fabric smart contracts for distributed decision-making in a system of multiple mobile robots. This enables us to deliver the same functionality within a secure and trustable process, with enhanced identity and data access management. Our results show the effectiveness of the UWB role allocation for continuously varying spatial formations of six autonomous mobile robots, while demonstrating a low impact on latency and computational resources of adding the blockchain layer that does not affect the localization process.

Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) is the latest release of a framework for enabling robot applications. Data Distribution Service (DDS) middleware is used for communication between nodes in a ROS2 cluster. The DDS middleware provides a distributed discovery system, message definitions and serialization, and security. In ROS2, the DDS middleware is accessed through an abstraction layer, making it easy to switch from one implementation to another. The existing middleware implementations differ in a number of ways, e.g., in how they are supported in ROS2, in their support for the security features, their ease of use, their performance, and their interoperability. In this work, the focus is on the ease of use, interoperability, and security features aspects of ROS2 DDS middleware. We compare the ease of installation and ease of use of three different DDS middleware, and test the interoperability of different middleware combinations in simple deployment scenarios. We highlight the difference that enabling the security option makes to interoperability, and conduct performance experiments that show the effect that turning on security has on the communication performance. Our results provide guidelines for choosing and deploying DDS middleware on a ROS2 cluster.

AbuSaif is a human-like social robot designed and built at the UAE University's Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Lab. AbuSaif was initially operated by a classical personal computer (PC), like most of the existing social robots. Thus, most of the robot's functionalities are limited to the capacity of that mounted PC. To overcome this, in this study, we propose a web-based platform that shall take the benefits of clustering in cloud computing. Our proposed platform will increase the operational capability and functionality of AbuSaif, especially those needed to operate artificial intelligence algorithms. We believe that the robot will become more intelligent and autonomous using our proposed web platform.

The Robotic Operating System (ROS) is a popular framework for robotics research and development. It's a system that provides hardware abstraction with low-level device management to handle communications and services. ROS is a distributed system, which allows various nodes in a network to communicate using a method such as message passing. When integrating systems using ROS, it is vital to consider the security and privacy of the data and information shared across ROS nodes, which is considered to be one of the most challenging aspects of ROS systems. The goal of this study is to examine the ROS architecture, primary components, and versions, as well as the types of vulnerabilities that might compromise the system. In order to achieve the CIA's three fundamental security criteria on a ROS-based platform, we categorized these vulnerabilities and looked into various security solutions proposed by researchers. We provide a comparative analysis of the ROS-related security solutions, the security threats and issues they addressed, the targeted architecture of the protection or defense system, the solution's evaluation methodology and the evaluation metric, and the limitations that might be viewed as unresolved issues for the future course of action. Finally, we look into future possibilities and open challenges to assist researchers to develop more secure and efficient ROS systems.

Multi robot systems are defined as a collection of two or more robots that are capable of working autonomously while coordinating with each other. Three challenges emerge while designing any multi robot system. The robots have to coordinate their path planning or trajectory planning in order to avoid collision during the course of navigation, while collaborating tasks with other robots to achieve a specific end goal for the system. The other challenge, which is the focus of this paper, is the security of the entire multi robot system. Since robots have to coordinate with each other, any one of them being malicious due to any kind of security threat, can lead to a chain reaction that may compromise the entire system. Such security threats can be fatal if not dealt with immediately. This paper proposes the use of a Hybridized Blockchain Model (HBM) to identify such security threats and take necessary actions in real time so that the system does not encounter any catastrophic failure. The proposed security architecture uses ROS (Robot operating system) to decentralize the information collected by robot clients and HBM to monitor the clients and take necessary real time actions.

RISC-V is free and open standard instruction set architecture following reduced instruction set computer principle. Because of its openness and scalability, RISC-V has been adapted not only for embedded CPUs such as mobile and IoT market, but also for heavy-workload CPUs such as the data center or super computing field. On top of it, Robotics is also a good application of RISC-V because security and reliability become crucial issues of robotics system. These problems could be solved by enthusiastic open source community members as they have shown on open source operating system. However, running RISC-V on local FPGA becomes harder than before because now RISC-V foundation are focusing on cloud-based FPGA environment. We have experienced that recently released OS and toolchains for RISC-V are not working well on the previous CPU image for local FPGA. In this paper we design the local FPGA platform for RISC-V processor and run the robotics application on mainstream Robot Operating System on top of the RISC-V processor. This platform allow us to explore the architecture space of RISC-V CPU for robotics application, and get the insight of the RISC-V CPU architecture for optimal performance and the secure system.

Robot Operating System (ROS) is becoming more and more important and is used widely by developers and researchers in various domains. One of the most important fields where it is being used is the self-driving cars industry. However, this framework is far from being totally secure, and the existing security breaches do not have robust solutions. In this paper we focus on the camera vulnerabilities, as it is often the most important source for the environment discovery and the decision-making process. We propose an unsupervised anomaly detection tool for detecting suspicious frames incoming from camera flows. Our solution is based on spatio-temporal autoencoders used to truthfully reconstruct the camera frames and detect abnormal ones by measuring the difference with the input. We test our approach on a real-word dataset, i.e. flows coming from embedded cameras of self-driving cars. Our solution outperforms the existing works on different scenarios.

Industrial robots are playing an important role in now a day industrial productions. However, due to the increasing in robot hardware modules and the rapid expansion of software modules, the reliability of operating systems for industrial robots is facing severe challenges, especially for the light-weight edge computing platforms. Based on current technologies on resource security isolation protection and access control, a novel resource management model for real-time edge system of multiple robot arms is proposed on light-weight edge devices. This novel resource management model can achieve the following functions: mission-critical resource classification, resource security access control, and multi-level security data isolation transmission. We also propose a fault location and isolation model on each lightweight edge device, which ensures the reliability of the entire system. Experimental results show that the robot operating system can meet the requirements of hierarchical management and resource access control. Compared with the existing methods, the fault location and isolation model can effectively locate and deal with the faults generated by the system.

With the wide application of modern robots, more concerns have been raised on security and privacy of robotic systems and applications. Although the Robot Operating System (ROS) is commonly used on different robots, there have been few work considering the security aspects of ROS. As ROS does not employ even the basic permission control mechanism, applications can access any resources without limitation, which could result in equipment damage, harm to human, as well as privacy leakage. In this paper we propose an access control mechanism for ROS based on an extended policy-based access control (PBAC) model. Specifically, we extend ROS to add an additional node dedicated for access control so that it can provide user identity and permission management services. The proposed mechanism also allows the administrator to revoke a permission dynamically. We implemented the proposed method in ROS and demonstrated its applicability and performance through several case studies.

To bring a uniform development platform which seamlessly combines hardware components and software architecture of various developers across the globe and reduce the complexity in producing robots which help people in their daily ergonomics. ROS has come out to be a game changer. It is disappointing to see the lack of penetration of technology in different verticals which involve protection, defense and security. By leveraging the power of ROS in the field of robotic automation and computer vision, this research will pave path for identification of suspicious activity with autonomously moving bots which run on ROS. The research paper proposes and validates a flow where ROS and computer vision algorithms like YOLO can fall in sync with each other to provide smarter and accurate methods for indoor and limited outdoor patrolling. Identification of age,`gender, weapons and other elements which can disturb public harmony will be an integral part of the research and development process. The simulation and testing reflects the efficiency and speed of the designed software architecture.

With the growing use of the Robot Operating System (ROS), it can be argued that it has become a de-facto framework for developing robotic solutions. ROS is used to build robotic applications for industrial automation, home automation, medical and even automatic robotic surveillance. However, whenever ROS is utilized, security is one of the main concerns that needs to be addressed in order to ensure a secure network communication of robots. Cyber-attacks may hinder evolution and adaptation of most ROS-enabled robotic systems for real-world use over the Internet. Thus, it is important to address and prevent security threats associated with the use of ROS-enabled applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for securing ROS-enabled robotic system by integrating ROS with the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. We manage to secure robots' network communications by providing authentication and data encryption, therefore preventing man-in-the-middle and hijacking attacks. We also perform real-world experiments to assess how the performance of a ROS-enabled robotic surveillance system is affected by the proposed approach.

The Robot Operating System (ROS) are being deployed for multiple life critical activities such as self-driving cars, drones, and industries. However, the security has been persistently neglected, especially the image flows incoming from camera robots. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of robot cameras using ROS. We points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over the flows incoming from the robot cameras. Furthermore, we propose an intrusion detection system to detect abnormal flows. Our defense approach is based on images comparisons and unsupervised anomaly detection method. We experiment our approach on robot cameras embedded on a self-driving car.

The usage of robot is rapidly growth in our society. The communication link and applications connect the robots to their clients or users. This communication link and applications are normally connected through some kind of network connections. This network system is amenable of being attached and vulnerable to the security threats. It is a critical part for ensuring security and privacy for robotic platforms. The paper, also discusses about several cyber-physical security threats that are only for robotic platforms. The peer to peer applications use in the robotic platforms for threats target integrity, availability and confidential security purposes. A Remote Administration Tool (RAT) was introduced for specific security attacks. An impact oriented process was performed for analyzing the assessment outcomes of the attacks. Tests and experiments of attacks were performed in simulation environment which was based on Gazbo Turtlebot simulator and physically on the robot. A software tool was used for simulating, debugging and experimenting on ROS platform. Integrity attacks performed for modifying commands and manipulated the robot behavior. Availability attacks were affected for Denial-of-Service (DoS) and the robot was not listened to Turtlebot commands. Integrity and availability attacks resulted sensitive information on the robot.

Autonomous technologies have been rapidly replacing the traditional manual intervention nearly in every aspect of our life. These technologies essentially require robots to carry out their automated processes. Nowadays, with the emergence of industry 4.0, robots are increasingly being remote-controlled via client-server connection, which creates uncommon vulnerabilities that allow attackers to target those robots. The development of an open source operational environment for robots, known as Robot Operating System (ROS) has come as a response to these demands. Security and privacy are crucial for the use of ROS as the chance of a compromise may lead to devastating ramifications. In this paper, an overview of ROS and the attacks targeting it are detailed and discussed. Followed by a review of the ROS security and digital investigation studies.

In recent years, humanoid robots have become quite ubiquitous finding wide applicability in many different fields, spanning from education to entertainment and assistance. They can be considered as more complex cyber-physical systems (CPS) and, as such, they are exposed to the same vulnerabilities. This can be very dangerous for people acting that close with these robots, since attackers by exploiting their vulnerabilities, can not only violate people's privacy, but, more importantly, they can command the robot behavior causing them bodily harm, thus leading to devastating consequences. In this paper, we propose a solution not yet investigated in this field, which relies on the use of secure enclaves, which in our opinion could represent a valuable solution for coping with most of the possible attacks, while suggesting developers to adopt such a precaution during the robot design phase.

Robots are becoming more and more prevalent in many real world scenarios. Housekeeping, medical aid, human assistance are a few common implementations of robots. Military and Security are also major areas where robotics is being researched and implemented. Robots with the purpose of surveillance in war zones and terrorist scenarios need specific functionalities to perform their tasks with precision and efficiency. In this paper, we present a model of Military Surveillance Robot developed using Robot Operating System. The map generation based on Kinect sensor is presented and some test case scenarios are discussed with results.

While the introduction of the softwarelization technologies such as SDN and NFV transfers main focus of network management from hardware to software, the network operators still have to care for a lot of network and computing equipment located in the network center. Toward fully automated network management, we believe that robotic approach will be significant, meaning that robot will care for the physical equipment on behalf of human. This paper explains our experience and insight gained throughout development of a network management robot. We utilize ROS(Robot Operating System) which is a powerful platform for robot development and secures the ease of development and expandability. Our roadmap of the network management robot is also shown as well as three use cases such as environmental monitoring, operator assistance and autonomous maintenance of the equipment. Finally, the paper briefly explains experimental results conducted in a commercial network center.

Robotics and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enveloping our society at an exponential rate due to lessening costs and better availability of hardware and software. Additionally, Cloud Robotics and Robot Operating System (ROS) can offset onboard processing power. However, strong and fundamental security practices have not been applied to fully protect these systems., partially negating the benefits of IoT. Researchers are therefore tasked with finding ways of securing communications and systems. Since security and convenience are oftentimes at odds, securing many heterogeneous components without compromising performance can be daunting. Protecting systems from attacks and ensuring that connections and instructions are from approved devices, all while maintaining the performance is imperative. This paper focuses on the development of security best practices and a mesh framework with an open-source, multipoint-to-multipoint virtual private network (VPN) that can tie Linux, Windows, IOS., and Android devices into one secure fabric, with heterogeneous mobile robotic platforms running ROSPY in a secure cloud robotics infrastructure.