Scanning the Internet for ROS: A View of Security in Robotics Research

Security is particularly important in robotics, as robots can directly perceive and affect the physical world. We describe the results of a scan of the entire IPv4 address space of the Internet for instances of the Robot Operating System (ROS), a widely used robotics software platform. We identified a number of hosts supporting ROS that are exposed to the public Internet, thereby allowing anyone to access robotic sensors and actuators. As a proof of concept, and with the consent of the relevant researchers, we were able to read image sensor information from and actuate a physical robot present in a research lab in an American university. This paper gives an overview of our findings, including our methodology, the geographic distribution of publicly-accessible platforms, the sorts of sensor and actuator data that is available, and the different kinds of robots and sensors that our scan uncovered. Additionally, we offer recommendations on best practices to mitigate these security issues in the future.