Visible to the public Privacy and security challenges for autonomous agents : A study of two social humanoid service robots

TitlePrivacy and security challenges for autonomous agents : A study of two social humanoid service robots
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2022
AuthorsBiström, Dennis, Westerlund, Magnus, Duncan, Bob, Jaatun, Martin Gilje
Conference Name2022 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom)
Keywordsaccountability, Agent, autonomous agents, autonomy, cloud computing, DLT, Human Behavior, humanoid robot, machine learning, privacy, Protocols, pubcrawl, Robot sensing systems, Scalability, security, Social Agents, social robots
AbstractThe development of autonomous agents have gained renewed interest, largely due to the recent successes of machine learning. Social robots can be considered a special class of autonomous agents that are often intended to be integrated into sensitive environments. We present experiences from our work with two specific humanoid social service robots, and highlight how eschewing privacy and security by design principles leads to implementations with serious privacy and security flaws. The paper introduces the robots as platforms and their associated features, ecosystems and cloud platforms that are required for certain use cases or tasks. The paper encourages design aims for privacy and security, and then in this light studies the implementation from two different manufacturers. The results show a worrisome lack of design focus in handling privacy and security. The paper aims not to cover all the security flaws and possible mitigations, but does look closer into the use of the WebSocket protocol and it's challenges when used for operational control. The conclusions of the paper provide insights on how manufacturers can rectify the discovered security flaws and presents key policies like accountability when it comes to implementing technical features of autonomous agents.
NotesISSN: 2330-2186
DOI10.1109/CloudCom55334.2022.00040
Citation Keybistrom_privacy_2022