Adding Salt to Pepper: A Structured Security Assessment over a Humanoid Robot
The rise of connectivity, digitalisation, and robotics, combined with the race for bringing artificial intelligence into every aspect of our daily life, is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently neglected, yet a hacked robot can act as an insider threat in organizations, industries, public spaces, and private homes. In this paper, we perform a detailed security assessment of Pepper, a commercial humanoid robot, and we show how it is extremely easy to take over and command it. Furthermore, we suggest how these issues could be easily fixed, thus, strongly avoided in the future, as we believe that such products should undergo an inflexible security evaluation, before even considering to sell them on the public market.
READ FULL TEXT