The boom for robotics technologies in recent years has also empowered a new generation of robotics software. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is one of the most popular frameworks for robotics researchers and makers which is moving towards commercial and industrial use. Security-wise however, ROS is vulnerable to attacks. It is rather easy to inject or eavesdrop data in a ROS application. This opens many different ways to attack a ROS application resulting in data loss, monetary damage or even physical injury. In this paper we present a secure communication channel enabling ROS-nodes to communicate with authenticity and confidentiality. We secure ROS on a peer-to-peer basis in the direct interaction between publishers and subscribers. We describe the implementation changes we have made to the ROS core and assess the overhead introduced by the new security functions.

A visual sensor network (VSN) consists of a large amount of camera nodes which are able to process the captured image data locally and to extract the relevant information. The tight resource limitations in these networks of embedded sensors and processors represent a major challenge for the application development. In this paper, we focus on finding optimal VSN configurations which are basically given by: 1) the selection of cameras to sufficiently monitor the area of interest; 2) the setting of the cameras' frame rate and resolution to fulfill the quality of service requirements; and 3) the assignment of processing tasks to cameras to achieve all required monitoring activities. We formally specify this configuration problem and describe an efficient approximation method based on an evolutionary algorithm. We analyze our approximation method on three different scenarios and compare the predicted results with measurements on real implementations on a VSN platform. We finally combine our approximation method with an expectation-maximization algorithm for optimizing the coverage and resource allocation in VSN with pan-tilt-zoom camera nodes.

While the topic of security in industrial applications has gained some momentum in recent years, there are still severe security vulnerabilities which are actively exploited for attacks. The robot operating system (ROS) is expected to further grow in usage and to be used in many industrial applications. Analysis, however, shows that it lacks several security enhancements in order to make it suitable for industrial use. In its current state, false data and commands can be injected posing a possible safety risk for the resulting product and humans in the production. In addition, data may be eavesdropped and used by outsiders to gain insight into the production process. In this paper we propose a security architecture intended for use on top of ROS on the application level. We use a dedicated authorization server to ensure that only valid nodes are part of the application. Cryptographic methods ensure data confidentiality and integrity. We show in a demonstration with a collaborative robot how our architecture can be used to secure a ROS-based application.

Robotics is becoming more and more ubiquitous, but the pressure to bring systems to market occasionally goes at the cost of neglecting security mechanisms during the development, deployment or while in production. As a result, contemporary robotic systems are vulnerable to diverse attack patterns, and an a posteriori hardening is at least challenging, if not impossible at all. This book aims to stipulate the inclusion of security in robotics from the earliest design phases onward and with a special focus on the cost-benefit tradeoff that can otherwise be an inhibitor for the fast development of affordable systems. We advocate quantitative methods of security management and design, covering vulnerability scoring systems tailored to robotic systems, and accounting for the highly distributed nature of robots as an interplay of potentially very many components. A powerful quantitative approach to model-based security is offered by game theory, providing a rich spectrum of techniques to optimize security against various kinds of attacks. Such a multi-perspective view on security is necessary to address the heterogeneity and complexity of robotic systems. This book is intended as an accessible starter for the theoretician and practitioner working in the field.