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How Dangerous Could a Hacked Robot Possibly Be?
alphadogg writes "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. 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."
No matter how "fixed" things are someone will always find a way to circumvent security.
They speak of "compromising" these robots as if user programmable devices are inherently bad. I don't want to see devices locked down into black box "no touch" state because of some fear mongering.
That said, it has always been the case with computers (and robots are just computers with moving appendages) that if a hacker has physical access to the device, you're basically screwed anyways.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The hacked robot is as dangerous as the person who hacked it.
See Isaac Asimov for the exact quote, but it basically says robots may not harm humans. Because the law is encoded *in the hardware* there's no way that it can be altered.
Very noble, very pure, very useless when your robot doesn't have any intelligence and just executes commands blindly.
I'm more concerned about someone hacking a Predator or Reaper.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
See Isaac Asimov for the exact quote, but it basically says robots may not harm humans. Because the law is encoded *in the hardware* there's no way that it can be altered.
Except that pretty well all of Asimovs stories were about how the 3 laws could be subverted by finding complex interactions that were not and could not be covered by the application of those simplistic laws
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Ugh. I feel the need to clarify, before the shouts from the peanut gallery. Yes, some robots have computer vision and are not 'blind', yes some robots can be well programmed and very smart, but that's still not the same thing as a true reasoning intelligence. Robots are only as good as their software and, if their programming has been corrupted, there is nothing you can do to get around that.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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They want you to play with them and make them do cool things. They don't necessarily want other people to drive up outside your house and use the robots' cameras and microphones to spy on you over WiFi. The problem is that the features that enable the first aren't secured, and therefore they can also be used to do the second.