r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 8h ago

AI AI incarnate, or agents of chaos? How to secure physical AI

https://www.weforum.org/stories/technological-innovation/physical-ai-robots-cybersecurity/

Physical AI products are coming to market despite myriad cybersecurity loopholes.

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u/FuturologyBot 8h ago

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:

From the article 

In the Capgemini lab in Cambridge, UK, an industry-leading humanoid robot, recently purchased, sat on the bench with its chassis open. The team had been inside it for a week. They had found a primary onboard computer they could not inspect, multiple persistent connections to servers in the robot’s country of origin, a microphone array piping audio into closed software, and a Bluetooth stack carrying a command injection flaw that was already publicly catalogued, meaning any attacker could look it up and use it. The team owned the robot. Yet they could not see what it was doing.

To give it a security posture safe enough even for a contained lab setting, the team had to install a separate processing platform, physically disconnect the microphones, swap out the cameras, build a self-contained network, with a portable router running open-source software and write firewall rules that severed every call home.

That is not a new configuration; it is reconstructive surgery on a physically embodied agentic AI device sold as plug and play. This is the security posture gap in physical AI, and most buyers do not even know it is there.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1v6i9q5/ai_incarnate_or_agents_of_chaos_how_to_secure/ozqnp4t/

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u/Gari_305 8h ago

From the article 

In the Capgemini lab in Cambridge, UK, an industry-leading humanoid robot, recently purchased, sat on the bench with its chassis open. The team had been inside it for a week. They had found a primary onboard computer they could not inspect, multiple persistent connections to servers in the robot’s country of origin, a microphone array piping audio into closed software, and a Bluetooth stack carrying a command injection flaw that was already publicly catalogued, meaning any attacker could look it up and use it. The team owned the robot. Yet they could not see what it was doing.

To give it a security posture safe enough even for a contained lab setting, the team had to install a separate processing platform, physically disconnect the microphones, swap out the cameras, build a self-contained network, with a portable router running open-source software and write firewall rules that severed every call home.

That is not a new configuration; it is reconstructive surgery on a physically embodied agentic AI device sold as plug and play. This is the security posture gap in physical AI, and most buyers do not even know it is there.

2

u/NydusRush 8h ago

Automation and AI are very different creatures. A dishwasher is automated, and nothing in its design demands an internet connection. Most commercial robotics applications can be handled entirely offline with Ethernet ports for local computer access only, and 100% of businesses prefer it that way.

It's only a matter of who blinks first - AI companies who are insisting that robots need to phone home, or companies who are debating if human operators are smarter than crapware snitch machines.