The Robotics CTF, featured on Import AI

Think robots are insecure? Think you can prove it? Enter a new “capture the flag” competition.

Originally published at Import AI, a weekly newsletter about artificial intelligence, read by more than ten thousand experts, written by Jack Clark, strategy and Communications Director at OpenAI.

Original text published in the newsletter:

Think robots are insecure? Think you can prove it? Enter a new “capture the flag” competition:
Alias Robotics, a Spanish robot cybersecurity company,, has released the Robotics Capture The Flag (RCTF), a series of nine scenarios designed to challenge wannabe-robot hackers. “The Robotics CTF is designed to be an online game, available 24/7, launchable through any web browser and designed to learn robot hacking step by step,” they write.
 Scenarios: The RCTF consists of nine scenarios that will challenge hackers to exfiltrate information from robots, snoop on robot operating system (ROS) traffic, find hardcoded credentials in ROS source code, and so on. One of the scenarios is listed as “coming soon!” and promises to give wannabe hackers access to “an Alias Robotics’ crafted offensive tool”.
 Free hacks! The researchers have released the scenarios under an open source TK license on GitHub. “We envision that as new scenarios become available, the sources will remain at this repository and only a subset of them will be pushed to our web servers http://rctf.aliasrobotics. com for experimentation. We invite the community of roboticists and security researchers to play online and get a robot hacker rank,” they write.
 Why it matters: Robotics are seen as one of the next frontiers for contemporary AI research and techniques, but as this research shows – and other research on hacking physical robots published in ImportAI #109 – the substrates on which many robots are built are still quite insecure.
Read more: Robotics CTF (RCTF), A Playground for Robot Hacking (Arxiv).
Check out the competition and sign-up here (Alias Robotics website).