Quantitative impact analysis of application-level attacks on a robotic platform

Robots are important examples of cyberphysical systems. Typically, robots are battery powered, which are a potential target for cyber-physical attacks to drain batteries and reduce their lifespan. When the battery is drained, the robot is not available and results in denial-of-service. Hence, robotic security and operation duration are fundamental requirements. The main objective of this paper is to provide an impact-based quantitative security risk assessment of three application level attacks targeting a well-known mobile robot platform that is called the PeopleBot (TM). The novelty of our work is that we successfully drained a fully-charged robot battery using application level attacks that include exhausting the computing resources of the robot. The attacks cause a reduction in the robot availability time. The average availability time from the performed attacks was reduced by 11.78%. We followed the adversarial risk assessment template provided in NIST. Finally, some mitigation strategies for the performed attacks were suggested.