Detection and Prevention: Toward Secure Mobile Robotic Systems
Open Access
- Author:
- Guo, Pinyao
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 16, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Peng Liu, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Peng Liu, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Anna Cinzia Squicciarini, Committee Member
Sencun Zhu, Committee Member
Minghui Zhu, Outside Member - Keywords:
- secure mobile robotic system
cyber-physical system security
intrusion detection
anomaly detection
vehicle security
robot security
intrusion prevention - Abstract:
- Mobile robotic systems are widely deployed and are rapidly evolving in almost every aspect of the modern society, including household, entertainment, manufacturing, security and national defense, etc. The evolution has been driven by the developments in wireless communication, sensing, mobile computing, and autonomous control. While the technologies are dedicated to advance the robotics industry, ironically, a wide spectrum of safety and security risks arises from themselves. Researchers and industry practitioners have demonstrated that mobile robotic systems are significantly threatened by various intentional attacks and unintentional failures due to the extra surfaces introduced by these technologies. These threats can be exploited by adversaries to thwart normal operations and lead to misbehaviors. Unlike safety and security threats in traditional information and computation systems where the consequences are typically constrained within the cyberspace where software runs, e.g., denial-of-service, privacy breaches, data corruption, etc., threats in mobile robotic systems could be abused by adversaries into disastrous consequences such as physical damages or human injuries. In order to defeat attacks and failures raised in mobile robotic systems, researchers propose countermeasures including both detection and preventive approaches. However, there are still gaps between existing defense schemes and the properties of real-world robotic systems, e.g., nonlinearity, noises. Moreover, facing more experienced adversaries and the ever-growing functionality fruitfulness, many dangerous revealed/potential attacks or failures cannot be holistically handled by existing defense schemes. Therefore, the robotics world remains insecure. This dissertation research studies the detection and prevention of attacks and failures within mobile robotic systems. Regarding the detection problem, we focus on active misbehaviors that are capable of actively altering system behaviors and directly causing damages to the physical world. To defeat active misbehaviors, we propose a practical intrusion detection approach that detects misbehaviors that target on various robot components and are launched from various channels. The approach leverages the physical dynamics of mobile robots to detect misbehaviors in sensors and actuators. We explore issues raised in real-world implementations, e.g., distinctive robot dynamic models, sensor quantity and quality, decision choices, etc., for practicality purposes. We develop two detection methods under both single and networked contexts. In terms of a preventive approach, we present a protection mechanism that provides generic reference monitoring in the context of modern commodity vehicles. The mechanism leverages trusted execution environment featured by modern ARM-architecture boards to build a trusted computing base. We design a message firewall as a demonstrative example enabled by the protection mechanism.