Seeing is Not Believing: Breaking the Physical-to-Digital Trust Boundary in Robotics

Abstract:In multi-robot collaboration, task handovers rely on downstream verifiers performing remote attestation, which inspects sensor telemetry to ensure a robot's physical behavior strictly matches its assigned task. But can this telemetry be trusted? We show that it often cannot. In this paper, we uncover a severe vulnerability in Robot Operating System (ROS) 2: by modifying a single environment variable, an adversary can execute a pre-built hook to covertly intercept and inject both telemetry and control signals before they are published. Consequently, adversaries can hijack a robot to perform dangerous tasks while spoofing downstream verifiers with synthesized fake telemetry. Worse still, by exploiting the widespread reliance on third-party Docker containers and auxiliary tools, attackers can distribute compromised packages embedded with these malicious hooks to launch such attacks easily. On a physical Franka Emika robotic arm running Secure ROS 2, our attack injects fabricated telemetry in real time with only around 3 ms of jitter, preserving temporal synchronization and hardware integrity while achieving an 87% success rate even against an AI-based detector. We have responsibly disclosed these findings to the ROS 2 development team. We prepared a demo video available at this https URL.

Robotics (cs.RO); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

arXiv:2609.08280 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.08280v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.08280 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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