Security maintenance is the fundamental requirement for security compliance. If a robot’s software in a manufacturing line or retail environment is not maintained, sooner or later attackers may gain a foothold on it and possibly use it to gain access to other corporate assets. Over the years, several security breaches have been reported with severe monetary and data privacy repercussions.
For ROS robots, security maintenance includes monitoring and security patching for the Robot Operating System (ROS) base and metapackages, dependencies such as Python and OpenCV, and the OS. All software needs to be constantly maintained and patched. But security patching is time-consuming and work-intensive, and as a result, it detracts companies from their robotics development. Security maintenance can also be costly and the challenges scale up as you manage a fleet of devices.
Consequently, it becomes imperative to provide adequate security maintenance for devices that interact not only with the virtual world but with the physical world as well. It is also important to provide reliable tools for innovators that will make this work easier and allow them to focus on their groundbreaking work, while not overlooking critical cybersecurity controls. Tools that will help not only the companies but also their end-users.
In this whitepaper, we present an introduction to the security landscape, the importance of security maintenance and its challenges. We also present the benefits of ROS ESM, Canonical’s service for ROS security maintenance delivered in partnership with Open Robotics.
In this whitepaper you will learn:
- The security risks for robotics.
- The importance of security maintenance.
- ROS ESM benefits, testing and delivering.