Secured action authorization for industrial mobile robots

The increased deployment of mobile robots in industry poses higher risks for safety issues and damage of production material caused by abnormal robot behavior. Abnormal behavior can be caused by issues such as operational errors or security weaknesses. Security weaknesses entail attacks that might cause serious harm for humans and production material. One possibility to mitigate such attacks is action authorization. In this paper, we propose an authorization mechanism for actuator actions on mobile robots to prevent adversaries from executing false commands on a robot. The mechanism uses a ticketing system and relies on sensor data as well as plausibility checks. The tickets are issued to specific actuators to authorize the requested action. The sensor data adds to the understanding of the current context and the plausibility checks are used to check that specific actions are allowed to be performed in a given order. Security is further supported by secure elements that protect confidential data from being revealed.