Secure Robotic Vehicles: Vulnerabilities and Mitigation Strategies

Robotic vehicles are becoming more widespread and used in many industries, including agriculture, manufacturing, and defense. They are safety-critical systems because of the fact that they are mobile, autonomous, and can operate in hazardous environments. The focus on robotic systems in the last several decades has been to add new complex functionality, in many cases using artificial intelligence. Many of these new technologies are fairly sophisticated and expose robotic vehicles to new vulnerabilities, especially when vehicles need to operate autonomously. Security and safety are connected and preventing intentional attacks on mobile robots improves safety and allows robots to complete their missions in challenging and hostile environments. In addition, robots that move can and need to adapt and counteract adversarial attacks and adapt to sensor and actuator faults. Robotic vehicles are also real-time systems; their ability to function is determined by their ability to maintain these characteristics all the time. In this work, we present the major classes of attacks on robotic vehicles and analyze the existing and propose some new mitigation strategies to counteract the attacks. Our scope is on robotic vehicles in general, with a specialized focus on UAVs as a class of vehicles receiving more attention and presenting significant security challenges. We discuss strategies based on simplex architecture, enforcers, partitioning, redundancy, self-adaptation, and dynamic architectures during run-time.