On cyber-physical attacks in bilateral teleoperation systems: An experimental analysis

In the last years there has been a significant increase in the number of attacks to the security of cyber-physical systems such as SCADA systems and PLC's. We investigate security issues in bilateral teleoperation systems i.e., systems in which the tele-operated robots reflect back to the operator reaction forces from the task being performed. We classify the cyber-physical attacks in terms of target component, knowledge of the system, and goal. We then implement our attacks on a single-input single-output bilateral teleoperation system equipped with a two-layer control architecture for guaranteeing stability despite unknown communication delay. This setup allows us to study the impact of our attacks, and represents a first step towards a complete threat model with corresponding counter-measures in more complex bilateral teleoperation systems.