alurity, a toolbox for robot cybersecurity
This work tackles cybersecurity vulnerabilities in robots, which pose safety risks to humans, by providing a tool to improve collaboration and research efficiency, though it is incremental as it builds on existing security practices.
The paper addresses the lack of offensive cybersecurity tools in robotics by introducing alurity, a modular toolbox designed to accelerate security testing and triage, with results demonstrated through use cases over a year.
The reuse of technologies and inherent complexity of most robotic systems is increasingly leading to robots with wide attack surfaces and a variety of potential vulnerabilities. Given their growing presence in public environments, security research is increasingly becoming more important than in any other area, specially due to the safety implications that robot vulnerabilities could cause on humans. We argue that security triage in robotics is still immature and that new tools must be developed to accelerate the testing-triage-exploitation cycle, necessary for prioritizing and accelerating the mitigation of flaws. The present work tackles the current lack of offensive cybersecurity research in robotics by presenting a toolbox and the results obtained with it through several use cases conducted over a year period. We propose a modular and composable toolbox for robot cybersecurity: alurity. By ensuring that both roboticists and security researchers working on a project have a common, consistent and easily reproducible development environment, alurity aims to facilitate the cybersecurity research and the collaboration across teams.