Cloud & Telecom Security

商店里的玩具机器人、能够打扫卫生的机器人到流水线上熟练操作的机器人，这些大家都非常熟悉了。电视里的机器人比赛节目是很多小朋友、大人们的最爱。华盛顿大学的专家开始对破解这些机器人进行了研究。研究发现当前设计的机器人很容易被远程控制，被控制的后果很严重，窃听、物理破坏、甚至人身伤害…都有可能，比当前传统的计算机黑客队我们的威胁来的更加直接。试想一下，在未来的某一天，家里买了个保姆机器人，然后就有些晚上开始有了动静，有个影子很有兴趣地在你的床边走来走去….

不知哈工大、北理工、清华等机器人专家们是否在机器人通信和控制、逻辑判断等问题考虑了这些现实的安全问题…

How Dangerous Could a Hacked Robot Possibly Be?

By ROBERT MCMILLAN of IDG News Service\San Francisco Bureau, IDG
Published: October 8, 2009

It seems like a question ripped from the back of a cheap sci-fi novel: What happens when the robots are turned against us?

But 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.

Robots have emerged as popular consumer devices over the past few years — primarily as toys, but also as household chore robots such as iRobot’s Roomba vacuuming machine.

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.

The researchers aren’t so much worried about the scenario depicted in James Cameron’s movie Terminator, where machines develop self-awareness and decide to wipe out humanity. They’re afraid of a world where hackers can take control of the robots we’ve brought into our homes.

Some of today’s robots operate as wireless access points, and Kohno’s team found that a nearby attacker could connect to someone else’s robot quite easily. Robots such as the Rovio can also be controlled over the Internet, meaning that if a hacker could somehow sniff the victim’s user name and password, he could turn the robot into a remote-controlled spy machine.

“We think that consumers should at least be aware that there is the possibility that someone would listen in on their robot and take over their robot and have mobile eyes and ears in their home,” said Tamara Denning a PhD student who also worked on the paper. “They’re little computers.”

The University of Washington team says that as more sophisticated robots come online — especially future generations of powerful household robots — they could be misused in ways that their designers have not foreseen.

In their paper, they discuss ideas such as “robot vandalism” — even weak robots can push something fragile down a flight of stairs — and “robot suicide.” Robots could be used to eavesdrop on conversations or frighten small children too, the researchers said.

The attacks that they can actually pull off may sound more creepy than scary, but Kohno said that robot makers will serve their customers best by thinking of these issues from the start, rather than having to patch machines after they get compromised. “Let’s think about security and privacy as one of the initial design goals,” he said.