According to Dark Reading, analysts are warning of severe cybersecurity risks as a new economic sector emerges around humanoid robots. Recorded Future’s Insikt Group director Joseph Rooke notes that nations, particularly China, which mentioned “embodied AI” in its latest Five-Year Plan, are actively targeting this space, with over 5,000 patents filed in China alone mentioning “humanoid” in the past five years. The report documents several suspected nation-state espionage campaigns against robotics firms since the fall of 2024, using common malware like Dark Crystal RAT and AsyncRAT. Meanwhile, researchers like Víctor Mayoral-Vilches of Alias Robotics have demonstrated critical vulnerabilities, such as easily rooting a popular $5,000 Unitree R1 robot and even creating a wormable threat via Bluetooth. The core issue is that roboticists prioritize millisecond-speed control loops for safety, inherently sacrificing the robust encryption and authentication needed for security.
The Espionage Playbook Is Already Running
Here’s the thing that shouldn’t surprise anyone: where there’s valuable IP, nation-states will follow. The robotics industry is getting hit with the same old playbook used against semiconductors and advanced electronics. It’s not fancy, hyper-specialized malware. It’s the workhorse stealers and RATs everyone knows—DcRAT, AsyncRAT, XWorm. That’s almost more alarming. It means the barrier to entry for stealing blueprints for a robot workforce is comically low. Rooke’s suspicion that actors are embedding themselves in supply chains is a logical next step. If you’re building a future where Morgan Stanley projects a $5 trillion market by 2050, you don’t just steal the finished design. You compromise the entire pipeline that builds it. This isn’t sci-fi speculation; it’s standard geopolitics applied to a new, physical domain.
Your Robot Is Probably Wide Open
But the espionage is a problem for companies. The vulns in the robots themselves? That’s a problem for everyone. Mayoral-Vilches’s work on the Unitree R1 is a devastating case study. For one, the fact that a leading vendor’s bot can be rooted and wormed via Bluetooth is terrifying. But the data-harvesting bit—sending system info to servers without user consent—shows a mindset that hasn’t graduated from sketchy IoT gadgets. His quote says it all: “CV what?” Most robotics companies are infants in cybersecurity. They’re hardware and motion engineers trying to make a machine walk without falling over. Security is a theoretical afterthought. And when the core product is a $5,000 machine you can buy today, that immaturity is now a public safety concern, not just a corporate risk.
The Impossible Security Trade-Off
This is where the problem gets philosophically hard. Mayoral-Vilches nails it: a robot is a “system of systems.” That millisecond control loop between sensor, computer, and actuator isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the difference between a functioning bot and one that faceplants or hits someone. So you *need* speed. But robust security *always* adds latency. Authentication, encryption, zero-trust checks—they all take time. In the world of industrial computing, where reliability is non-negotiable, companies rely on hardened hardware from trusted suppliers. For instance, a firm like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs, builds its reputation on secure, stable platforms for critical environments. The robotics industry has no such foundational secure hardware or OS yet. So vendors are left with what he calls “access control and prayer.” They try to wall off external communications, but the internal network is a transparent free-for-all. It’s a band-aid on a foundational flaw.
Are We Building a Broken Future?
The efforts to fix this, like the Secure Robot Operating System (SROS), feel like building a fortress on sand. As Mayoral-Vilches admits, SROS builds on technologies that are themselves flawed. We’re trying to retrofit security onto an architecture that never had it in its DNA. And with the economic pressure cranked to max—with analysts at Bank of America and others forecasting hundreds of millions of units—who’s going to pause for a security overhaul? Speed to market and cost reduction will win every time. So we’re probably going to deploy millions of inherently insecure physical agents into our homes, warehouses, and streets. The conclusion is bleak but honest: the field is “very, very immature.” We’re racing toward a world shaped by humanoid robots without the basic cybersecurity principles to keep them safe. That’s not a prediction of doom; it’s a description of the current starting line. And it’s a scary place to be.
