Michele De Donno

Alberto Giaretta, Michele De Donno, Nicola Dragoni

The rise of connectivity, digitalization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently neglected, yet a hacked robot can act as an insider threat in organizations, industries, public spaces, and private homes. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of Pepper, a commercial humanoid robot. Our analysis, composed by an automated and a manual part, points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over and command the robot. Furthermore, we suggest how these issues could be fixed, thus, avoided in the future. The very final aim of this work is to push the rise of the security level of IoT products before they are sold on the public market.

Michele De Donno, Nicola Dragoni, Alberto Giaretta et al.

The 2016 is remembered as the year that showed to the world how dangerous Distributed Denial of Service attacks can be. Gauge of the disruptiveness of DDoS attacks is the number of bots involved: the bigger the botnet, the more powerful the attack. This character, along with the increasing availability of connected and insecure IoT devices, makes DDoS and IoT the perfect pair for the malware industry. In this paper we present the main idea behind AntibIoTic, a palliative solution to prevent DDoS attacks perpetrated through IoT devices.