Abstract

Robots are becoming increasingly integrated in our daily lives, providing services in civilian, industrial, and military applications. Many of those applications require robots to be remotely operated and controlled through communication channels. This makes the robotic system susceptible to a class of attacks targeting the connection between the controlling client and the robot, which can render the robot unavailable. The objective of our research is to identify, estimate and prioritize the risk associated with attacks targeting the availability of the robotic system. To achieve our objective, we perform an impact oriented semi-quantitative risk assessment of the loss of availability on the well-known PeopleBot™ mobile robot platform. We experimented with several well-known attacks that can target and affect the availability of the robot. The results indicate that attacks can potentially lead to loss of availability which may result in serious cyber-physical consequences.

Key words: Cyber-physical Security, Robot, Availability, Threats, Attacks, Vulnerability, Risk, Risk Assessment, Mitigation, PeopleBot.