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Robot Operating System (ROS) pp 183–225Cite as

Penetration Testing ROS

Part of the Studies in Computational Intelligence book series (SCI,volume 831)

Abstract

ROS is the most popular framework in robotics research and it also grows in terms of industrial use. This makes ROS a worthwhile target for attackers especially since security is not addressed by the core framework itself. Its open architecture and flexibility are also the reasons why ROS suffers from security issues. For example, in ROS it is possible to isolate single nodes from the rest of the application without the ROS master, the other nodes or even the node itself (i.e., its business code) noticing it. This is true for publishers, subscribers and services alike. This makes attacks very difficult to spot at runtime. Penetration testing is the most common security testing practice. The goal is to test an application for possible security flaws. To better facilitate penetration testing for ROS, we introduce ROSPenTo and Roschaos, tools that make use of the vulnerabilities of ROS and demonstrate how ROS applications can be sabotaged by an attacker. In this tutorial you will learn about the ROS XML-RPC API, which is our main attack point. You will see, how API attacks on ROS work in depth. You will get to know Roschaos and ROSPentTo, two tools, which can be used to manipulate running ROS applications.

Keywords

  • ROS
  • Security
  • Penetration testing

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.rosindustrial.org.

  2. 2.

    wiki.ros.org/ROS/Master_API.

  3. 3.

    wiki.ros.org/ROS/Parameter%20Server%20API.

  4. 4.

    wiki.ros.org/ROS/Slave_API.

  5. 5.

    http://wiki.ros.org/actionlib/DetailedDescription, last accessed 07/02/2018.

  6. 6.

    Download ROSPenTo at https://github.com/jr-robotics/ROSPenTo and follow building instructions in the README file.

  7. 7.

    A video of ROSPenTo in action can be found at https://vimeo.com/295958352.

  8. 8.

    http://www.mono-project.org.

  9. 9.

    http://wiki.ros.org/roscpp_tutorials.

  10. 10.

    http://wiki.ros.org/rospy_tutorials.

  11. 11.

    http://wiki.ros.org/omron_os32c_driver.

  12. 12.

    https://github.com/IFL-CAMP/iiwa_stack.

  13. 13.

    https://github.com/ThomasTimm/ur_modern_driver.

  14. 14.

    https://github.com/ruffsl/roschaos.

  15. 15.

    http://wiki.ros.org/roswtf.

  16. 16.

    http://www.ros2.org/.

  17. 17.

    https://github.com/ros2/sros2.

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Acknowledgements

The work reported in this article has been supported by the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (bmvit) within the project framework Collaborative Robotics and by the programme “ICT of the Future”, managed by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), under grant no. 861264.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Robotics and Mechatronics, Joanneum Research, Lakeside B08, 9020, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Bernhard Dieber, Sebastian Taurer & Benjamin Breiling

  2. Contextual Robotics Institute, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA

    Ruffin White & Henrik Christensen

  3. Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Dorsoduro 3246, 30123, Venezia, Italy

    Gianluca Caiazza & Agostino Cortesi

Authors
  1. Bernhard Dieber
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  2. Ruffin White
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  3. Sebastian Taurer
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  4. Benjamin Breiling
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  5. Gianluca Caiazza
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  6. Henrik Christensen
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  7. Agostino Cortesi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bernhard Dieber .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Information Systems, Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Prof. Dr. Anis Koubaa

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Dieber, B. et al. (2020). Penetration Testing ROS. In: Koubaa, A. (eds) Robot Operating System (ROS). Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 831. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20190-6_8

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