CybersecurityResearchers hack a teleoperated surgical robot, revealing security flaws
Real-world teleoperated robots, which are controlled by a human who may be in another physical location, are expected to become more commonplace as the technology evolves. They are ideal for situations which are dangerous for people: fighting fires in chemical plants, diffusing explosive devices or extricating earthquake victims from collapsed buildings. Researchers conducted a series of experiments in which they hacked a next generation teleoperated surgical robot — one used only for research purposes — to test how easily a malicious attack could hijack remotely controlled operations in the future and to make those systems more secure.
To make cars as safe as possible, we crash them into walls to pinpoint weaknesses and better protect people who use them.
This is the idea behind a series of experiments conducted by a University of Washington engineering team who hacked a next generation teleoperated surgical robot — one used only for research purposes — to test how easily a malicious attack could hijack remotely controlled operations in the future and to make those systems more secure.
Real-world teleoperated robots, which are controlled by a human who may be in another physical location, are expected to become more commonplace as the technology evolves. They are ideal for situations which are dangerous for people: fighting fires in chemical plants, diffusing explosive devices or extricating earthquake victims from collapsed buildings.
Outside of a handful of experimental surgeries conducted remotely, doctors typically use surgical robots today to operate on a patient in the same room using a secure, hardwired connection. But telerobots may one day routinely provide medical treatment in underdeveloped rural areas, battlefield scenarios, Ebola wards or catastrophic disasters happening half a world away.
A UW release reports that in two recent papers, UW BioRobotics Lab researchers demonstrated that next generation teleoperated robots using nonprivate networks — which may be the only option in disasters or in remote locations — can be easily disrupted or derailed by common forms of cyberattacks. Incorporating security measures to foil those attacks, the authors argue, will be critical to their safe adoption and use.
“We want to make the next generation of telerobots resilient to some of the threats we’ve detected without putting an operator or patient or any other person in the physical world in danger,” said lead author Tamara Bonaci, a UW doctoral candidate in electrical engineering.
To expose vulnerabilities, the UW team mounted common types of cyberattacks as study participants used a teleoperated surgical robot developed at the UW for research purposes to move rubber blocks between pegs on a pegboard.
By mounting “man in the middle” attacks, which alter the commands flowing between the operator and robot, the team was able to maliciously disrupt a wide range of the robot’s functions — making it hard to grasp objects with the robot’s arms — and even to completely override command inputs. During denial-of-service attacks, in which the attacking machine flooded the system with useless data, the robots became jerky and harder to use.
