CryptoROS: A secure communication architecture for ROS-based applications

Abstract

Cyber-attacks are a growing threat to future robots. The shift towards automatization has increased relevance and reliance on robots. Securing robots has been secondary or ternary priority and thus robots are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Securing robots must become an essential (built-in) part of the design rather than being considered as a subsequent (later) add-on. ROS is a widely used and popular open source framework and robots using ROS are increasing in popularity. However, ROS is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. ROS needs to be secured before robots using ROS reach mass market. This study aims at proposing an architecture to secure ROS, using cryptography mechanism, which addresses the most common ROS safety issues. The advantages of our proposed secure architecture, CryptoROS, is that no changes to ROS software libraries and tools is required, it works with all ROS client libraries (e.g. rospy, roscpp) and rebuilding nodes is not necessary.