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CORDIS - Résultats de la recherche de l’UE
CORDIS

Secure and Privacy-preserving Indoor Robotics for Healthcare Environments

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RESPECT (Secure and Privacy-preserving Indoor Robotics for Healthcare Environments)

Période du rapport: 2023-05-01 au 2024-04-30

Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence hold a promise for the radical transformation of healthcare services. Besides, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that robots are crucial allies during pandemics. Yet, the adoption of these technologies is impeded by concerns related to cybersecurity issues. Indeed, cyberattacks already had dire physical repercussions in healthcare, leading to delayed treatments and death of patients. The rise of such cybersecurity incidents is a timely reminder that not only the volume of attacks is increasing but their diversity is also expanding, posing a significant threat towards disrupting clinical care delivery. While ongoing research activities in both robotics and artificial intelligence fields, focus essentially on the safe and appropriate use of surgical, service, or logistics robotics operating in healthcare spaces, cybersecurity aspects are not sufficiently well covered in the research community.

The growing range of security threats and requirements has recently forced organizations from all over the world to intensify their investments in new safety solutions. Besides, regulations are also in favour of a growing need for guidelines and resilient commercial products. Nevertheless, cybersecurity is one of the most constrained sectors in the labour market, both worldwide and at the European level

The RESPECT project objective is to create a sustainable European and inter-sectoral network of organisations working on a joint research programme aiming to design and develop concrete defense strategies to ensure secure, safe, resilient and privacy-preserving operation of indoor mobile robotics solutions for logistic applications in healthcare environments. Safety ensures that the robots will not harm patients while security ensures that the robots and their embedded software may not be attacked. A resilient medical robotic system is a system that can adapt to significant changes in the environment. Privacy-preservation ensures the protection of patients and users medical and personal data.
Specifically the main research objectives of the project are: (i) Explore and identify system-specific both cyber and physical weaknesses posing security, privacy, and safety threats, in autonomous mobile robots operating in a healthcare environment; (ii) Analyse surfaced vulnerability issues in conjunction with projected threats and propose defence measures and mitigation strategies towards safeguarding mobile robots operation. (iii) Define and standardize a minimal set of vulnerability testing procedures and guidelines leveraging and extending the Robot Security Framework, that ensures safe and autonomous robotic fleet management in a “safety-critical setting.

The project is implemented through staff exchanges among different organizations with complementary expertise in cybersecurity, healthcare, cloud computing and robotics from 5 countries across EU promoting transfer of knowledge between industry and academia.
The consortium conducted a review of the state of the art on robotics cybersecurity, reviewing robotic systems both threat landscape and vulnerabilities. Then, the consortium addressed the security-related description of a typical robotic system describing the working assumptions and the use case driving the security analysis. Besides, the consortium elaborated a threat model, which includes the description of a threat, its category, its assessment, and the impacted assets, as well as the description of related attacks and their mitigation strategy. The consortium furthered the analysis by addressing continuous threat monitoring and operational aspects. Finally, the consortium defined the resilience strategy and the validation criteria, and addressed the issue of data privacy in electronic health records.

The consortium finalized the attack framework, and implemented the individual attacks, including those targeting the robotic architecture, the vulnerabilities of 3rd party components, and the cloud-based applications. In a second phase, the consortium finalized the defenses to the aforementioned attacks: the set of mitigations explored ranges from system-level countermeasures to protections of more high-level components, which are essential to robotic systems of the health domain. Then, we have provided recommendations formalizing the lessons learned within the context of the RESPECT action activities. We have addressed a new standard from the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to address the specific performance and safety characteristics of robotically assisted equipment. We have then given more broader guidelines and recommendations in healthcare robotics to ensure patient safety, data security, and the overall effectiveness of these technologies.

Transfer of knowledge were ensured though regular workshops as well as the final dissemination event. The work performed was published and presented in several top-notch scientific conferences. Finally, a potential exploitation plan was elaborated for the consortium as whole and for each participating organization.
The consortium pushed further state of the art, as it proposes both an attack exploitation framework for mobile robots’ vulnerability surface, as well as the defense and mitigation solutions to respond to these attacks.

The consortium pushed forward the development and implementation of hardening solutions to protect and safeguard robotics operation in healthcare environments. The defense solutions cover all robotics aspects, ranging from software to hardware, including robotic architecture and components, the vulnerabilities of 3rd party components, and the cloud-based applications. Our defense solutions not only ensure safe and secure robot operation but protect as well patient sensitive data and ensure their privacy when exchanged through robotic devices and cloud infrastructure.
The RESPECT overall attack framework
The RESPECT system architecture
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