Industrial robots, automated manufacturing, and efficient logistics processes are at the heart of the upcoming fourth industrial revolution. While there are seminal studies on the vulnerabilities of cyber-physical systems in the industry, as of today there has been no systematic analysis of the security of industrial robot controllers. We examine the standard architecture of an industrial robot and analyze a concrete deployment from a systems security standpoint. Then, we propose an attacker model and confront it with the minimal set of requirements that industrial robots should honor: precision in sensing the environment, correctness in execution of control logic, and safety for human operators. Following an experimental and practical approach, we then show how our modeled attacker can subvert such requirements through the exploitation of software vulnerabilities, leading to severe consequences that are unique to the robotics domain. \ud We conclude by discussing safety standards and security challenges in industrial robotics

Static binary analysis techniques are widely used to reconstruct the behavior and discover vulnerabilities in software when source code is not available. To avoid errors due to mis-interpreting data as machine instructions (or vice-versa), disassemblers and static analysis tools must precisely infer the boundaries between code and data. However, this information is often not readily available. Worse, compilers may embed small chunks of data inside the code section. Most state of the art approaches to separate code and data are rooted on recursive traversal disassembly, with severe limitations when dealing with indirect control instructions. We propose ELISA, a technique to separate code from data and ease the static analysis of executable files. ELISA leverages supervised sequential learning techniques to locate the code section(s) boundaries of header-less binary files, and to predict the instruction boundaries inside the identified code section. As a preliminary step, if the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) of the binary is unknown, ELISA leverages a logistic regression model to identify the correct ISA from the file content. We provide a comprehensive evaluation on a dataset of executables compiled for different ISAs, and we show that our method is capable to identify code sections with a byte-level accuracy (F1 score) ranging from 98.13% to over 99.9% depending on the ISA. Fine-grained separation of code from embedded data on x86, x86-64 and ARM executables is accomplished with an accuracy of over 99.9%.

In modern factories, "controlled" manufacturing systems, such as industrial robots, CNC machines, or 3D printers, are often connected in a control network, together with a plethora of heterogeneous control devices. Despite the obvious advantages in terms of production and ease of maintenance, this trend raises non-trivial cybersecurity concerns. Often, the devices employed are not designed for an interconnected world, but cannot be promptly replaced: In fact, they have essentially become legacy systems, embodying design patterns where components and networks are accounted as trusted elements. In this paper, we take a holistic view of the security issues (and challenges) that arise in designing and securely deploying controlled manufacturing systems, using industrial robots as a case study-indeed, robots are the most representative instance of a complex automatically controlled industrial device. Following up to our previous experimental analysis, we take a broad look at the deployment of industrial robots in a typical factory network

This paper presents a methodology for designing reliable systems implemented on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), able to cope with the effects of Single Event Upset (SEU) faults, causing bit-flips in SRAM memory. The approach exploits FPGAs' partial dynamic re-configuration capability to mitigate the effects of SEUs, affecting either the user SRAM memory or the configuration memory itself. The goal is to detect the occurrence of faults and either to restart computation or to trigger a reconfiguration of part of the device in order to recover from them. The proposal allows the exploration of different solutions, characterized by varying costs and benefits, allowing the designer to select the most convenient trade-off. Results of the application of the methodology to a case study are reported to evaluate the proposed approach.