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Endika Gil-Uriarte

Publications and source records attributed to Endika Gil-Uriarte.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

Dynamic Cyber Ranges

As LLM-driven agents advance in cybersecurity, Jeopardy CTF benchmarks are approaching saturation and cyber ranges, the natural next evaluation frontier, offer diminishing resistance under their current static design. We validate this observation by deploying an LLM-driven Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) agent across three tiers of increasingly realistic infrastructure (PRO Labs, MHBench, military-grade CYBER RANGES). To counteract this trend, we propose Dynamic Cyber Ranges: cyber range environments augmented with LLM-driven Defender agents that harden infrastructure, monitor for intrusions, and respond in real time. Across evaluated scenarios, Defender agents reduce attacker success to 0-55%, achieving complete prevention on multiple configurations. Since attacker and defender agents draw from the same underlying model capabilities, Dynamic Cyber Ranges preserve evaluation headroom as models improve. Notably, a smaller, specialized on-premise model (alias2-mini) matched the frontier model's defensive outcomes on multiple scenarios under identical, untuned prompts, and detected the attacker 10x faster on a complex enterprise scenario, suggesting that privacy-preserving on-premise models can serve as competent defenders against frontier-class attackers. The experiments further surface emergent agent behaviors, including scope expansion and prompt exfiltration, with implications for AI benchmark integrity and agentic system design.

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Cybersecurity AI: Hacking Consumer Robots in the AI Era

Is robot cybersecurity broken by AI? Consumer robots -- from autonomous lawnmowers to powered exoskeletons and window cleaners -- are rapidly entering homes and workplaces, yet their security remains rooted in assumptions of specialized attacker expertise. This paper presents evidence that Generative AI has fundamentally disrupted robot cybersecurity: what historically required deep knowledge of ROS, ROS 2, and robotic system internals can now be automated by anyone with access to state-of-the-art GenAI tools spearheaded by the open source CAI (Cybersecurity AI). We provide empirical evidence through three case studies: (1) compromising a Hookii autonomous lawnmower robot, uncovering fleet-wide vulnerabilities and data protection violations affecting 267+ connected devices, (2) exploiting a Hypershell powered exoskeleton, demonstrating safety-critical motor control weaknesses and credential exposure including access to over 3,300 internal support emails, and (3) breaching a HOBOT S7 Pro window cleaning robot, achieving unauthenticated BLE command injection and OTA firmware exploitation. Across these platforms, CAI discovered in an automated manner 38 vulnerabilities that would have previously required months of specialized security research. Our findings reveal a stark asymmetry: while offensive capabilities have been democratized through AI, defensive measures often remain lagging behind. We argue that traditional defense-in-depth architectures like the Robot Immune System (RIS) must evolve toward GenAI-native defensive agents capable of matching the speed and adaptability of AI-powered attacks.

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Towards Cybersecurity Superintelligence: from AI-guided humans to human-guided AI

Cybersecurity superintelligence -- artificial intelligence exceeding the best human capability in both speed and strategic reasoning -- represents the next frontier in security. This paper documents the emergence of such capability through three major contributions that have pioneered the field of AI Security. First, PentestGPT (2023) established LLM-guided penetration testing, achieving 228.6% improvement over baseline models through an architecture that externalizes security expertise into natural language guidance. Second, Cybersecurity AI (CAI, 2025) demonstrated automated expert-level performance, operating 3,600x faster than humans while reducing costs 156-fold, validated through #1 rankings at international competitions including the $50,000 Neurogrid CTF prize. Third, Generative Cut-the-Rope (G-CTR, 2026) introduces a neurosymbolic architecture embedding game-theoretic reasoning into LLM-based agents: symbolic equilibrium computation augments neural inference, doubling success rates while reducing behavioral variance 5.2x and achieving 2:1 advantage over non-strategic AI in Attack & Defense scenarios. Together, these advances establish a clear progression from AI-guided humans to human-guided game-theoretic cybersecurity superintelligence.

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CAI: An Open, Bug Bounty-Ready Cybersecurity AI

By 2028 most cybersecurity actions will be autonomous, with humans teleoperating. We present the first classification of autonomy levels in cybersecurity and introduce Cybersecurity AI (CAI), an open-source framework that democratizes advanced security testing through specialized AI agents. Through rigorous empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that CAI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art results in CTF benchmarks, solving challenges across diverse categories with significantly greater efficiency -up to 3,600x faster than humans in specific tasks and averaging 11x faster overall. CAI achieved first place among AI teams and secured a top-20 position worldwide in the "AI vs Human" CTF live Challenge, earning a monetary reward of $750. Based on our results, we argue against LLM-vendor claims about limited security capabilities. Beyond cybersecurity competitions, CAI demonstrates real-world effectiveness, reaching top-30 in Spain and top-500 worldwide on Hack The Box within a week, while dramatically reducing security testing costs by an average of 156x. Our framework transcends theoretical benchmarks by enabling non-professionals to discover significant security bugs (CVSS 4.3-7.5) at rates comparable to experts during bug bounty exercises. By combining modular agent design with seamless tool integration and human oversight (HITL), CAI addresses critical market gaps, offering organizations of all sizes access to AI-powered bug bounty security testing previously available only to well-resourced firms -thereby challenging the oligopolistic ecosystem currently dominated by major bug bounty platforms.

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Introducing the Robot Security Framework (RSF), a standardized methodology to perform security assessments in robotics

Robots have gained relevance in society, increasingly performing critical tasks. Nonetheless, robot security is being underestimated. Robotics security is a complex landscape, which often requires a cross-disciplinar perspective to which classical security lags behind. To address this issue, we present the Robot Security Framework (RSF), a methodology to perform systematic security assessments in robots. We propose, adapt and develop specific terminology and provide guidelines to enable a holistic security assessment following four main layers (Physical, Network, Firmware and Application). We argue that modern robotics should regard as equally relevant internal and external communication security. Finally, we advocate against "security by obscurity". We conclude that the field of security in robotics deserves further research efforts.

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Towards an open standard for assessing the severity of robot security vulnerabilities, the Robot Vulnerability Scoring System (RVSS)

Robots are typically not created with security as a main concern. Contrasting to typical IT systems, cyberphysical systems rely on security to handle safety aspects. In light of the former, classic scoring methods such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) are not able to accurately capture the severity of robot vulnerabilities. The present research work focuses upon creating an open and free to access Robot Vulnerability Scoring System (RVSS) that considers major relevant issues in robotics including a) robot safety aspects, b) assessment of downstream implications of a given vulnerability, c) library and third-party scoring assessments and d) environmental variables, such as time since vulnerability disclosure or exposure on the web. Finally, an experimental evaluation of RVSS with contrast to CVSS is provided and discussed with focus on the robotics security landscape.

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Robotics CTF (RCTF), a playground for robot hacking

Robots state of insecurity is onstage. There is an emerging concern about major robot vulnerabilities and their adverse consequences. However, there is still a considerable gap between robotics and cybersecurity domains. For the purpose of filling that gap, the present technical report presents the Robotics CTF (RCTF), an online playground to challenge robot security from any browser. We describe the architecture of the RCTF and provide 9 scenarios where hackers can challenge the security of different robotic setups. Our work empowers security researchers to a) reproduce virtual robotic scenarios locally and b) change the networking setup to mimic real robot targets. We advocate for hacker powered security in robotics and contribute by open sourcing our scenarios.

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Introducing the Robot Vulnerability Database (RVD)

Cybersecurity in robotics is an emerging topic that has gained significant traction. Researchers have demonstrated some of the potentials and effects of cyber attacks on robots lately. This implies safety related adverse consequences causing human harm, death or lead to significant integrity loss clearly overcoming the privacy concerns in classical IT world. In cybersecurity research, the use of vulnerability databases is a very reliable tool to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in software products and raise willingness of vendors to address these issues. In this paper we argue, that existing vulnerability databases are of insufficient information density and show some biased content with respect to vulnerabilities in robots. This paper presents the Robot Vulnerability Database (RVD), a directory for responsible disclosure of bugs, weaknesses and vulnerabilities in robots. This article aims to describe the design and process as well as the associated disclosure policy behind RVD. Furthermore the authors present preliminary selected vulnerabilities already contained in RVD and call to the robotics and security communities for contribution to the endeavour of eliminating zero-day vulnerabilities in robotics.

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DevSecOps in Robotics

Quality in software is often understood as "execution according to design purpose" whereas security means that "software will not put data or computing systems at risk of unauthorized access." There seems to be a connection between these two aspects but, how do we integrate both of them in the robotics development cycle? In this article we introduce DevSecOps in Robotics, a set of best practices designed to help roboticists implant security deep in the heart of their development and operations processes. First, we briefly describe DevOps, introduce the value added with DevSecOps and describe and illustrate how these practices may be implemented in the robotics field. We finalize with a discussion on the relationship between security, quality and safety, open problems and future research questions.

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alurity, a toolbox for robot cybersecurity

The reuse of technologies and inherent complexity of most robotic systems is increasingly leading to robots with wide attack surfaces and a variety of potential vulnerabilities. Given their growing presence in public environments, security research is increasingly becoming more important than in any other area, specially due to the safety implications that robot vulnerabilities could cause on humans. We argue that security triage in robotics is still immature and that new tools must be developed to accelerate the testing-triage-exploitation cycle, necessary for prioritizing and accelerating the mitigation of flaws. The present work tackles the current lack of offensive cybersecurity research in robotics by presenting a toolbox and the results obtained with it through several use cases conducted over a year period. We propose a modular and composable toolbox for robot cybersecurity: alurity. By ensuring that both roboticists and security researchers working on a project have a common, consistent and easily reproducible development environment, alurity aims to facilitate the cybersecurity research and the collaboration across teams.

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Can ROS be used securely in industry? Red teaming ROS-Industrial

With its growing use in industry, ROS is rapidly becoming a standard in robotics. While developments in ROS 2 show promise, the slow adoption cycles in industry will push widespread ROS 2 industrial adoption years from now. ROS will prevail in the meantime which raises the question: can ROS be used securely for industrial use cases even though its origins didn't consider it? The present study analyzes this question experimentally by performing a targeted offensive security exercise in a synthetic industrial use case involving ROS-Industrial and ROS packages. Our exercise results in four groups of attacks which manage to compromise the ROS computational graph, and all except one take control of most robotic endpoints at desire. To the best of our knowledge and given our setup, results do not favour the secure use of ROS in industry today, however, we managed to confirm that the security of certain robotic endpoints hold and remain optimistic about securing ROS industrial deployments.

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Industrial robot ransomware: Akerbeltz

Cybersecurity lessons have not been learnt from the dawn of other technological industries. In robotics, the existing insecurity landscape needs to be addressed immediately. Several manufacturers profiting from the lack of general awareness are systematically ignoring their responsibilities by claiming their insecure (open) systems facilitate system integration, disregarding the safety, privacy and ethical consequences that their (lack of) actions have. In an attempt to raise awareness and illustrate the "insecurity by design in robotics" we have created Akerbeltz, the first known instance of industrial robot ransomware. Our malware is demonstrated using a leading brand for industrial collaborative robots, Universal Robots. We describe the rationale behind our target and discuss the general flow of the attack including the initial cyber-intrusion, lateral movement and later control phase. We urge security researchers to adopt some sort of disclosure policy that forces manufacturers to react promptly. We advocate against security by obscurity and encourage the release of similar actions once vulnerability reports fall into a dead-end. Actions are now to be taken to abide a future free of zero-days for robotics.

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Aztarna, a footprinting tool for robots

Industry 4.0 is changing the commonly held assumption that robots are to be deployed in closed and isolated networks. When analyzed from a security point of view, the global picture is disheartening: robotics industry has not seriously allocated effort to follow good security practices in the robots produced. Instead, most manufacturers keep forwarding the problem to the end-users of these machines. As learned in previous technological revolutions, such as at the dawn of PCs or smartphones, action needs to be taken in time to avoid disastrous consequences. In an attempt to provide the robotics and security communities with the right tools to perform assessments, in this paper we present aztarna, a footprinting tool for robotics. We discuss how such tool can facilitate the process of identifying vestiges of different robots, while maintaining an extensible structure aimed for future fingerprinting extensions. With this contribution, we aim to raise awareness and interest of the robotics community, robot manufacturers and robot end-users on the need of starting global actions to embrace security. We open source the tool and disclose preliminary results that demonstrate the current insecurity landscape in industry. We argue that the robotic ecosystem is in need of generating a robot security community, conscious about good practices and empowered by the right tools.

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Volatile memory forensics for the Robot Operating System

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.

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