HoneyBot: A Honeypot for Robotic Systems

Historically, robotics systems have not been built with an emphasis on security. Their main purpose has been to complete a specific objective, such as to deliver the correct dosage of a drug to a patient, perform a swarm algorithm, or safely and autonomously drive humans from point A to point B. As more and more robotic systems become remotely accessible through networks, such as the Internet, they are more vulnerable to various attackers than ever before. To investigate remote attacks on networked robotic systems we have leveraged HoneyPhy, a physics-aware honeypot framework, to create the HoneyBot. The HoneyBot is the first software hybrid interaction honeypot specifically designed for networked robotic systems. By simulating unsafe actions and physically performing safe actions on the HoneyBot we seek to fool attackers into believing their exploits are successful, while logging all the communication to be used for attacker attribution and threat model creation. In this paper, we present the HoneyBot and discuss our proof of concept implementation. Our HoneyBot prototype swaps between physical actuation and using prebuilt models of sensor behavior for simulation at runtime given user input commands.