That Cool Robot May Be a Security Risk

By John Markoff

In the coming age of robotics, many of those autonomous machines will be internet-connected and mobile.

What could possibly go wrong?

Significant security flaws were found in an examination of six home and industrial robots, according to a report to be released Wednesday by IOActive, a computer security consulting firm with headquarters in Seattle. The report notes that only four of the six companies responded to the firm’s alert, and only two said they planned to make patches after being informed of the problems.

The researchers, who described the categories of vulnerabilities they had discovered in the report but not the specific flaws, said their research was simply an early reconnaissance of the field.

“It’s important to note that our testing was not even a deep, extensive security audit, as that would have taken a much larger investment of time and resources,” the authors wrote. “The goal for this work was to gain a high-level sense of how insecure today’s robots are, which we accomplished.”

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