[Diary Toggling Rates Up Cloud Antivirus
Jamar Lizarraga
The recent digital revolution led robots to become integrated more than ever into different domains such as agricultural, medical, industrial, military, police (law enforcement), and logistics. Robots are devoted to serve, facilitate, and enhance the human life. However, many incidents have been occurring, leading to serious injuries and devastating impacts such as the unnecessary loss of human lives. Unintended accidents will always take place, but the ones caused by malicious attacks represent a very challenging issue. This includes maliciously hijacking and controlling robots and causing serious economic and financial losses. This paper reviews the main security vulnerabilities, threats, risks, and their impacts, and the main security attacks within the robotics domain. In this context, different approaches and recommendations are presented in order to enhance and improve the security level of robotic systems such as multi-factor device/user authentication schemes, in addition to multi-factor cryptographic algorithms. We also review the recently presented security solutions for robotic systems.
With the latest digital revolution and the heavy reliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI), smart robots are being employed to speed up the transformation of digital operations [1, 2]. In this context, the market of intelligent machines, including autonomous robots, is exponentially growing [3]; more than 40 million robots were reportedly sold between 2016 and 2019 [4].
Unfortunately, the related work lacks a global understanding of the robotics security issues and their causes. Moreover, no recommendations have been made in regards of designing secure robotic systems.
The objective of this paper is to highlight the importance of adopting the various robotic techniques (i.e. drones, robots, underwater vehicles, AI, etc.) in every aspect of both the cyber and physical worlds. Also, the paper emphasizes that the robotic domain suffers from a set of security and safety threats that can lead to dangerous attacks. In this context, we review the robotics security threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks, in addition to providing a qualitative risk assessment for these attacks. Equally important, we present a set of possible solutions to overcome these attacks. Moreover, the robustness and efficiency of these solutions are analysed, and we suggest several recommendations to increase the security level of robotic systems. In summary, this paper provides a global review about the robotic security, which is not well presented in the literature.
We propose a list of recommendations and security requirements to safeguard robots against such attacks, to minimize their damage, and hence, to make the corresponding applications safer to deploy and use.
Robots have been deployed in different domains and employed in different fields, including civilian and military ones, which are summarized in Fig. 1. The figure illustrates the various robotic usages in different fields of operations for many tasks and purposes such as photography, product delivery, agriculture, wildlife monitoring, policing, search and rescue, emergency response, crisis/disaster response, casualty evacuation, reconnaissance and surveillance, counter-terrorism/insurgency, counter-IEDs/unexploded ordnance, border patrol, infrastructure inspections, and science. There are different types of robots depending on their field of operation: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) such as drones, Autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (AUAVs), Unmanned Aerial Combat Vehicles (UACVs) and Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) [30, 31], Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) such as robots and autonomous vehicles [32], and Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) such as underwater drones, Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV), Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles (ROUVs) and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) [33, 34].
Industrial robots are mainly used in order to reduce manpower. Robots have become artificially smart and able to perform jobs faster, safer, and with higher efficiency [38]. Such jobs include manufacturing, construction, transportation, and quality control. In particular, robots are being used in hazardous locations to perform dangerous tasks. They are also capable of performing repetitive tasks with the same precision and accuracy, better than their human counterparts.
Robots have been deployed in the medical domain to be used in tele-medicine, virtual care, and remote treatment concepts [29, 39]. In fact, they were designed to serve as medical robots, surgical robots, and hospital robots [40]. They are used to perform small surgeries accurately, and new medical robots are capable of performing Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) [41].
Robots are used in agriculture due to their efficient and increased performance in reducing manpower and resource consumption [42]. They are used to perform some tasks efficiently, especially when dealing with a large farming area that requires at least a dozen of workers and several days. This enhances irrigation, crop testing, crop agriculture, and so on.
Disaster robots can be used to reach and find helpless people who were isolated by floods, or stuck and lost somewhere [43, 44]. Disaster robots can perform jobs and reach places that humans cannot [45]. Their famous use was when Search and Rescue (SAR) robots were deployed to locate and find lost Thai cave boys safely [46]. Moreover, robots were used in the firefighting domain [47, 48], which helps in sparing the lives of firefighters and to access areas that are deemed too dangerous, too small, and/or too risky for firefighters. In fact, both robots and UAVs were used after the devastating Beirut port explosion that occurred at around 6:07 pm on August 4th, 2020, to help with assessing the damage and impact radius, as well as in the search for missing personnel [49,50,51,52]. The explosion was caused by the alleged detonation of 2750 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate due to lack of proper storage, equivalent to 1.1 kilotons of TriNitroToluene (TNT), and is considered as one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history.
Military robots became the latest adopted weapons to be used in most of military operations, especially with the extensive use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform target detection and to launch airstrikes [58]. Moreover, robots were used to counter the Improvized Explosive Device (IED) threat, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan [59]. In fact, they were being used by the British army in Northern Ireland since 1970s [60], to combat the IEDs threat imposed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its different factions and descendants [61,62,63]. Such robot techniques (Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)) evolved and were also used by US-led NATO forces (including the UK) in Iraq and Syria [64, 65], in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan [66,67,68,69]. Also, France used them in Mali, Somalia, and Nigeria [70, 71] against the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) and Al-Qaeda operatives, and other terrorist factions (i.e. Boko Haram, Al-Shabab). Turkey also used mainly combat drones (i.e. Bayraktar TB2), and UGV robots (TMR 2 (Kutlu), Zafer (Victory) and KAPLAN) in its campaign in Libya (along the United Arab Emirates who used Chinese-made UCAVs: Wing Loong II [72]) against Haftar forces, and in Syria against Syrian troops, Kurdish factions and Hezbollah members [73, 74]. Turkey also assisted Azerbaijan (using loitering munition such as Alpagu and Kargu, and UCAVs such as Bayraktar TB2) with help from Israel (using loitering munition such as Orbiter, Heron and Harop variants, and LORA missiles) [75, 76] during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict [77] against Armenia. Russia also reportedly used drones and UGVs in its conflict in Syria, Libya, and Ukraine [64, 78, 79]. Iran developed its own UGVs and UAVs, with many UAV variants being used in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Gaza (Shahed, Ababil, Ayoub, Samad, Mohajer, Karrar, Mirsad, Qasef, etc.) via its operators [80], advisers [81,82,83] and proxies (i.e. Houthis, Hamas, Hezbolah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)) [84,85,86]. However, Israel extensively relied on developing Anti-UAV/UGV countermeasures (i.e. Iron Dome patriot missiles, AI-based sensors, facial-recognition and heat-measuring cameras, jammers, laser-guided weapons, etc.), and introduced its own advanced version of UAV and UGV variants to combat the threatening Iranian presence in Syria (Unit 840, trans-border operations near Golan Heights), Southern Lebanon (Hezbollah tunnels and cross-border operations) [87,88,89], the West Bank and Gaza Strip [Hamas Group 9 specializing in tunnel warfare, cross-border operations (Nahal Oz tunnel attack, 2014 [90]), and Naval Commando Unit specializing in underwater tunnel capabilities, and underwater naval operations (Zikim Beach Landing, 2014)] [91,92,93]. Finally, armed drone swarms or Uninhabited Air Vehicles (UiAVs) may well be used by the UK next summer in 2021.
In fact, the robotic technology was not excluded from being adopted and used by both terrorists and insurgents alike. Robotics including tele-operated sniper rifles, assault rifles and machine guns, as well as remote-controlled autonomous vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles mounted with heavy machines guns were extensively used in conflicts such as in Syria, Iraq, and Libya by different fighting factions and insurgent groups (i.e. ISIS/ISIL, Al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda and Anti-Guaddafi forces) [105,106,107], in addition to the extensive use of drones and UAVs [108,109,110], and ISIS developed their own techniques [111,112,113,114].
Despite the great advantages and promising future the robotic field holds, some major concerns are still lurking around, and imposing serious threats and issues [128] that can potentially affect both humans and machines. For this reason, these main issues and challenges are presented in this section.
Robotic issues are not limited to one, but to many aspects that could exploit any vulnerability/security gap to target robotic systems and applications alike [10, 10, 129]. The aim is to identify and classify them to gain a better insight, which helps other fellow researchers in their quest to identify, tackle and overcome them.
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