Penetration testing ROS

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.