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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.
This is nothing new. The trick is to use time. If it takes longer to crack something that the product of cracking it is worth, you'd have no reason to even begin.
I am the lawn!
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.
Yes but the vulnerabilities they studied were all over the network vulnerabilities which could be exploited without physical access.
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.
All these robots need is a lightweight linux installation running an ssh daemon to communicate through. Then nobody has anything to worry about.