Aztarna, a footprinting tool for robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces aztarna, an open-source footprinting tool designed to identify and assess security vulnerabilities in industrial robots, aiming to improve security awareness and practices in the robotics industry.

Contribution

The paper presents aztarna, a novel extensible footprinting tool for robots, facilitating security assessments and raising awareness in the robotics community.

Findings

Demonstrates current insecurity in industrial robotics

Provides preliminary results using the tool

Highlights the need for a security-conscious robotic ecosystem

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is changing the commonly held assumption that robots are to be deployed in closed and isolated networks. When analyzed from a security point of view, the global picture is disheartening: robotics industry has not seriously allocated effort to follow good security practices in the robots produced. Instead, most manufacturers keep forwarding the problem to the end-users of these machines. As learned in previous technological revolutions, such as at the dawn of PCs or smartphones, action needs to be taken in time to avoid disastrous consequences. In an attempt to provide the robotics and security communities with the right tools to perform assessments, in this paper we present aztarna, a footprinting tool for robotics. We discuss how such tool can facilitate the process of identifying vestiges of different robots, while maintaining an extensible structure aimed for future fingerprinting extensions. With this contribution, we aim to raise awareness and interest of the robotics community, robot manufacturers and robot end-users on the need of starting global actions to embrace security. We open source the tool and disclose preliminary results that demonstrate the current insecurity landscape in industry. We argue that the robotic ecosystem is in need of generating a robot security community, conscious about good practices and empowered by the right tools.