Cyber-Physical Steganography in Robotic Motion Control
This work introduces a novel steganographic medium for robotics, potentially enabling covert communication in cyber-physical systems, though it is incremental as it adapts existing concepts to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of extending steganography to robotic motion control by encoding messages as environmental stimuli and decoding them from motion trajectories, achieving a proof of concept in simulated manipulation tasks with minimal motion deviation.
Steganography, the art of information hiding, has continually evolved across visual, auditory and linguistic domains, adapting to the ceaseless interplay between steganographic concealment and steganalytic revelation. This study seeks to extend the horizons of what constitutes a viable steganographic medium by introducing a steganographic paradigm in robotic motion control. Based on the observation of the robot's inherent sensitivity to changes in its environment, we propose a methodology to encode messages as environmental stimuli influencing the motions of the robotic agent and to decode messages from the resulting motion trajectory. The constraints of maximal robot integrity and minimal motion deviation are established as fundamental principles underlying secrecy. As a proof of concept, we conduct experiments in simulated environments across various manipulation tasks, incorporating robotic embodiments equipped with generalist multimodal policies.