Title: Volatile memory forensics for the Robot Operating System,
Abstract: The increasing impact of robotics on industry and on society will unavoidably
lead to the involvement of robots in incidents and mishaps. In such cases,
forensic analyses are key techniques to provide useful evidence on what
happened, and try to prevent future incidents. This article discusses volatile
memory forensics for the Robot Operating System (ROS). The authors start by
providing a general overview of forensic techniques in robotics and then
present a robotics-specific Volatility plugin named linux_rosnode, packaged
within the ros_volatility project and aimed to extract evidence from robot's
volatile memory. They demonstrate how this plugin can be used to detect a
specific attack pattern on ROS, where a publisher node is unregistered
externally, leading to denial of service and disruption of robotic behaviors.
Step-by-step, common practices are introduced for performing forensic analysis
and several techniques to capture memory are described. The authors finalize by
introducing some future remarks while providing references to reproduce their
work.