Distributed Intrusion Detection for the Security of Societies of Robots

TL;DR

This paper proposes a distributed intrusion detection system for robot societies, enabling individual robots to detect misbehaving neighbors based solely on local observations and social rules, enhancing security in autonomous multi-robot systems.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism and protocol for distributed intrusion detection that can be automatically generated for various robot societies and behaviors.

Findings

Effective detection of misbehaving robots demonstrated in examples

Protocol adapts to different social rules and robot dynamics

Enables autonomous, local security actions in robot groups

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of detecting possible intruders in a group of autonomous robots, which coexist in a shared environment and interact with each other according to a set of "social behaviors", or common rules. Such rules specify what actions each robot is allowed to perform in the pursuit of its individual goals: rules are distributed, i.e. they can evaluated based only on the state of the individual robot, and on information that can be sensed directly or through communication with immediate neighbors. We consider intruders as robots which misbehave, i.e. do not follow the rules, because of either spontaneous failures or malicious reprogramming. Our goal is to detect intruders by observing the congruence of their behavior with the social rules as applied to the current state of the overall system. Moreover, in accordance with the fully distributed nature of the problem, the detection itself must be peformed by individual robots, based only on local information. The paper introduces a formalism that allows to model uniformly a large variety of possible robot societies. The main contribution consists in the proposal of an Intrusion Detection System, i.e. a protocol that, under suitabkle conditions, allows individual robots to detect possible misbehaving robots in their vicinity, and trigger possible further actions to secure the society. It is worth noting that the generality of the protocol formalism makes so that local monitors can be automatically generated once the cooperation rules and the robot dynamics are specified. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is shown through application to examples of automated robotic systems.