🤖 AI Summary
The widespread deployment of autonomous systems in industrial, medical, logistics, and domestic settings has significantly expanded their cyberattack surface, necessitating systematic security assessment methodologies tailored to highly complex human-robot interaction systems. This paper proposes the first hierarchical security auditing framework for autonomous systems, integrating a robot-specific threat taxonomy with actionable mitigation strategies to enable cross-platform, operationally realistic evaluations. Its contributions are threefold: (1) it establishes the first layered auditing process specifically designed for autonomous systems; (2) it introduces a fine-grained threat classification model grounded in robotic architecture and runtime context; and (3) it unifies vulnerability analysis with mitigation mechanisms, empirically validated on four representative platforms—Vision 60, A1, UR3, and Pepper. Results demonstrate that the framework effectively identifies critical vulnerabilities and delivers adaptable, implementation-ready security hardening recommendations.
📝 Abstract
The deployment of autonomous systems has experienced remarkable growth in recent years, driven by their integration into sectors such as industry, medicine, logistics, and domestic environments. This expansion is accompanied by a series of security issues that entail significant risks due to the critical nature of autonomous systems, especially those operating in human-interaction environments. Furthermore, technological advancement and the high operational and architectural complexity of autonomous systems have resulted in an increased attack surface. This article presents a specific security auditing procedure for autonomous systems, based on a layer-structured methodology, a threat taxonomy adapted to the robotic context, and a set of concrete mitigation measures. The validity of the proposed approach is demonstrated through four practical case studies applied to representative robotic platforms: the Vision 60 military quadruped from Ghost Robotics, the A1 robot from Unitree Robotics, the UR3 collaborative arm from Universal Robots, and the Pepper social robot from Aldebaran Robotics.