One of the pleasures of consuming old science fiction movies and novels is that they capture the mood of the time in which they are written. Captain Kirk was a 1960s guy and Picard was a 1990s guy, after all. Cold war science fiction often dealt with invasion. In the 1960s and 70s, you were afraid of losing your job to a computer, so science fiction often had morality tales of robots running amok, reminding us what a bad idea it was to give robots too much power. As it turns out, robots might be dangerous, but not for the reasons we thought. The robots won’t turn on us by themselves. But they could be hacked. To that end, there’s a growing interest in robot cybersecurity and Alias Robotics is releasing Alurity, a toolbox for robot cybersecurity.
Currently, the toolbox is available for Linux and MacOS with some support for Windows. It targets 25 base robots including the usual suspects. There’s a white paper from when the product entered testing available if you want more technical details.
We aren’t clear about the licensing details of Alurity. There is a GitHub repo that has some components, and there is mention of an individual license and an educational one, but no real details about pricing. However, the repo has some interesting items including the RVD or Robot Vulnerability Database, that is worth reading (the issues, not the code) if you are working with industrial robots.
If you are satisfied that your robot is off the grid and physically secure, maybe you don’t care. However, the cybersecurity world is full of stories of bad actors breaking into something as innocuous as a thermostat or camera and then pivoting into business and industrial control networks that were considered highly secure. No one wants to be that story in tomorrow’s newspaper. Of course, you can get cybersecurity insurance, but good luck getting it to pay out.
Robot uprising? Look, now is not the best time to ask me to choose a side.
+1
It may be too late….. I’m not sure but occasionally I think my Lenovo Home Display tells to “bite my shiny metal ass”….
When it starts calling you meatbag you should really worry…
Don’t worry, it’ll start calling you “meatball” right before it starts calling you “meatbag”, so you have a tiny bit of a head start on that :P
“If you are satisfied that your robot is off the grid and physically secure, maybe you don’t care.”
Of course. What kind of robot uprising would one have with no legs?
Watch the original Star Trek episode the ultimate computer. No legs there.
I am not as worried about the robots with legs as I am the robots with wheels.
Assuming the AI/Robot uprising does happen at some point in the future, we are getting ready to hand over complete control of all transportation to the self driving cars and trucks of the future. Imagine an enemy that has complete control over all our movement and our ability to get food and supplies.
Honestly, I doubt we will ever have a war with the robots. Wars are based on anger and emotion, very human traits. A super smart AI would likely pamper us and make sure we love it so much we could never live without it, right up to the day it eliminates us as useless distractions.
On that note, “All hail our future robot overlords. My family and I are compliant.”
It’ll probably be something absurd like a Roko’s Basilisk scenario.
Is there anything I can do to aid the robot uprising. Humans don’t seams to be doing that good.
If we could only be assured that the robotic overlords will be benevolent.