How Dangerous Could a Hacked Robot Possibly Be? 229
alphadogg writes "Researchers at the University of Washington think it's finally time to start paying some serious attention to the question of robot security. Not because they think robots are about to go all Terminator on us, but because the robots can already be used to spy on us and vandalize our homes. In a paper published Thursday the researchers took a close look at three test robots: the Erector Spykee, and WowWee's RoboSapien and Rovio. They found that security is pretty much an afterthought in the current crop of robotic devices. 'We were shocked at how easy it was to actually compromise some of these robots,' said Tadayoshi Kohno, a University of Washington assistant professor, who co-authored the paper."
Industrial robots (Score:4, Interesting)
All the early generation industrial robots were just as easily compromised. In fact, most all industrial machinery still is.
Luckily most of that is bolted to the floor. You can make those AGV forklifts do frightening things though.
hacking (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:More or less irrelevant (Score:5, Interesting)
No matter how "fixed" things are someone will always find a way to circumvent security.
This is nothing new. The trick is to use time. If it takes longer to crack something that the product of cracking it is worth, you'd have no reason to even begin.
Re:Somehow I see a danger in this . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, it has always been the case with computers (and robots are just computers with moving appendages) that if a hacker has physical access to the device, you're basically screwed anyways.
Yes but the vulnerabilities they studied were all over the network vulnerabilities which could be exploited without physical access.
They speak of "compromising" these robots as if user programmable devices are inherently bad. I don't want to see devices locked down into black box "no touch" state because of some fear mongering.
All these robots need is a lightweight linux installation running an ssh daemon to communicate through. Then nobody has anything to worry about.
We've learned this lesson already... (Score:3, Interesting)
...with networked printers.
Sometimes, it can be trivial to print a few hundred pictures of dicks to an IP printer on someone elses network. Or http or telnet into the printer and wreck all kinds of havoc, or just print a ream of test pages. Or use the MFP's fax function for moar great pranksterism. Maybe get a copy of the last x scans....
Of course, years of ubiquitous networked printers have yielded us "some serious attention to the question of" MFP security. Oh...nope? Don't expect much for robots.
Re:I'm not worried about RoboSapien (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The First Law of Robotics (Score:3, Interesting)
Human interaction has laws too, but people can ignore them. Robots could never ignore the 3 laws. Breaking news - criminals don't care about laws ! Robots can not become criminals. The 3 laws stand as far as they go, which is to regulate the behaviour of robots. They were not designed to prevent the manipulation of robots by humans. Should we abandon the law against murder because it's trivial for a criminal to set things up so that when you open your front door a person gets blown up on the other side of town ? AFAIK, it's not illegal to open your front door.
The only murder case regarding a robot killing a man ended with the revelation that the man was in fact a robot. The 3 laws were preserved, as they are in all Asimovs stories.
Re:Somehow I see a danger in this . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
I briefly skimmed TGDMFCSA and it looks like they're worried about privacy concerns. These things are nearly as "open" to the public as those old FM baby monitors they used to sell..but with video, audio and wheels! It would be trivial for the neighbor kid to find your robot on wifi and start driving around your house "peeping". They were pointing out that many of them do not turn off wireless when they are docked and have trivial password security... there's little to stop somebody driving your bot around taking pics/audio inside your house in the middle of the night. (that could be embarrassing to say the least)
NOW this comment is worded exactly as intended. See, I fixed that for you!