Cyberphysical systems security applied to telesurgical robotics

a r t i c l e i n f o Researchers in telesurgical robotics and security collaborated to develop the Secure ITP, a security enhancement to the Interoperable Telesurgery Protocol (ITP). The ITP defines the structure for communication between telesurgery robots and controllers and has been adopted and tested by fourteen research groups in telesurgical robotics. The Secure ITP uses open source software tools and follows guidelines in Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) documents published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create asecurity enhancement prototype for demonstration purposes and tofacilitate the development of new security technologies which addressthe stringent requirements of telesurgery. Next generation surgical robots under development at the University of Washington BioRobotics Laboratory (BRL) and at SRI International will allow surgeons to perform robotic based Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) remotely [1,2,3]. Teleoperated surgical robots, or telesurgical robots, will allow highly trained medical personnel to provide skilled care from distant locations [1,3]. This capability may be used in civilian settings to allow surgeons to care for patients in underserved remote locations or in disaster areas. Ultimately, telesur-gical robots will be deployed into the battlefield to provide nearly immediate medical assistance to wounded soldiers [1,2]. These possibilities cannot be realized without developing telesurgi-cal robots specifically to function securely. The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) collaborated with the BRL to develop a security enhancement to the Interoperable Telesurgery Protocol (ITP). The ITP standardizes communication between telesurgical robot hardware (slaves) and telesurgical robot controllers (masters) so that slaves may interchangeably operate different masters [4,5]. Fourteen telesurgery research groups have adopted the standard and participated in a successful test of interoperability conducted by the BRL [6]. The Secure ITP addresses security issues for ITP based telesurgical robots allowing security to be deeply implemented in these complex cyberphysical systems. It addresses four security elements: communication, authentication, authorization , and security policy development and enforcement. The project uses software to simulate the hardware and unmodified control code from the BRL's RAVEN telesurgical robot [7] (see Fig. 1). OpenSSL provides several security tools for used to begin the development the Secure ITP. 2. Background Surgical robots, such as the daVinci® by Intuitive Surgical Incorporated of Sunnyvale, CA, are being used for a growing number of surgeries. These robots allow surgeons to perform Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) by indirectly controlling MIS instruments using robotic manipulators. Non-robotic MIS sometimes requires surgeons to …