'Help, I think my robotic arm is playing poker when I’m not home!?' And other concerns
Speaker/Bio
Kacper Wardega is a
PhD student working on formal methods for guaranteeing the safety of autonomous systems with Prof. Wenchao Li at Boston University.
Abstract
(based on article referenced below)
Industrial robots, automated manufacturing, and
efficient logistics processes are at the heart of the upcoming
fourth industrial revolution. While there are seminal studies on
the vulnerabilities of cyber-physical systems in the industry, as
of today there has been no systematic analysis of the security of
industrial robot controllers.
We examine the standard architecture of an industrial robot
and analyze a concrete deployment from a systems security
standpoint. Then, we propose an attacker model and confront
it with the minimal set of requirements that industrial robots
should honor: precision in sensing the environment, correctness
in execution of control logic, and safety for human operators.
Following an experimental and practical approach, we then
show how our modeled attacker can subvert such requirements
through the exploitation of software vulnerabilities, leading to
severe consequences that are unique to the robotics domain.
We conclude by discussing safety standards and security
challenges in industrial robotics.
Reference