In everyday life, we increasingly come across robots, but it is still rather strange to hear them talk. And if the robot says "Hello from hackers", then you can definitely get into the territory of nightmares.
The robot that spoke these words is called "Herb2"; it was created at the University of Washington. He was forced to say this by researchers at Brown University, across the country. They used "Herb2" as an illustration of the thesis: it is very easy to hack a robot. Their research has been published on the arXiv.org preprint server.
Robot hunt
To save time and resources, robotics uses the Robot Operating System (ROS), a collection of open source libraries and utilities. The ROS platform is widespread and lacking in security, making it an excellent target for the Brown University team.
They used the ZMap utility to scan the Internet to find robots running ROS. As a result, about a hundred robots connected to the network were found, of which about ten were identified as real robots (and not emulation programs). To do this, a completely detective work was carried out to find identifiers indicating that the bot had equipment, namely, phrases such as "information_about_camera", "capture", "turn on_sound".
When they came across a vulnerable robot, the researchers simply notified the owners that the robot was unsafe - with the exception of Herb2. The Browns have asked the owners of the robot for permission to prove that they can hack it.
With this permission, they instructed the robot to say this grim greeting. The published report contains a lot of technical details, but in general it is enough for us to know that it was not difficult.
Promotional video:
Honest warning
The ease with which the team at Brown University cracked down on "Herb2" should serve as a signal for a widespread awakening of robotics, but there is reason to worry that this will not happen.
"No one really thinks about the security of such things," computer scientist George Clarke told Wired magazine. - Such questions are postponed until later, in pursuit of the earliest possible release of the device to the market. I am worried about how this will affect the industry and the consumer market."
We are heading for a future in which robots will play an ever greater role. And if we don't want them to become puppets for malicious puppeteers, we will have to pay a lot more attention to their security.
Vadim Tarabarko