# Analyzing Impact and Systemwide Effects of the SlowROS Attack in an Industrial Automation Scenario
## 8 Conclusions  
This paper discussed and evaluated SlowROS, an innovative slow DoS threat directed towards the ROS Master, a mandatory ROS 1 component. In spite of the impending transition to ROS 2, improving ROS security is still quite relevant for the reasons given in Section 2.2. Among them, the most important one is that the deployment of ROS 2 is advancing more slowly than anticipated [40]. Hence, the possible security-related implications of the ROS/ROS 2 transition has been left to future work.  
By means of a realistic experimental test bed, it was shown that the attack effect unexpectedly went well beyond the single component being targeted, as it could seem at first sight. Instead, it caused a systemwide service disruption that eventually affects all ROS nodes. Table 3 summarizes all test scenarios.  
While designing SlowROS, the inner workings of the ROS Master and its underlying protocols were also thoroughly investigated. Besides being important for the design itself, the analysis led to an accurate characterization of the ROS Master connection timeout. Notably, one relevant discovery was related to the particularly high idle connection timeout adopted by the server. Future work on the topic may address such an aspect through additional tests. This characterization is crucial to saving bandwidth and making the SlowROS attack harder to detect.  
Moreover, the ROS Master response to different kinds of payloads, both legitimate and invalid, has been determined. This information is useful to devise future, stealthier variations of SlowROS. Finally, the information gained about the Linux TCP/IP protocol stack was leveraged to circumvent its SYN flooding detection and protection mechanism.  
Conceptualization, I.C.B. and E.C.; methodology, I.C.B. and E.C.; software, I.C.B. and E.C.; validation, I.C.B. and E.C.; data curation, I.C.B. and E.C.; writing--original draft preparation, I.C.B. and E.C.; writing--review and editing, I.C.B. and E.C.; project administration, L.D.; funding acquisition, L.D. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This work was partially supported by project SERICS (PE00000014) under the MUR National Recovery and Resilience Plan funded by the European Union--NextGenerationEU.  
The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors on request.  
The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to publish the results.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l l} \hline \hline
**Scenario** & **Paper Section** & **Strategy** & **DoS?** \\ \hline
1 & Section 6.2 & Single connection, \(T_{\text{max}}=10^{6}\) s & \(\chi\) \\
2 & Section 6.2 & Multiple connections, no payload, \(T_{\text{max}}=3600\) s & \(\checkmark\) \\
3 & Section 6.3 & Multiple connections, partial/malformed payload, \(T_{\text{max}}=3600\) s & \(\checkmark\) \\
4 & Section 6.3 & Multiple connections, full payload, \(T_{\text{max}}=3600\) s & \(\checkmark\) \\
5 & Section 6.5 & Multiple connections, \(T_{\text{SYN}}<1\) ms (SYN flooding) & \(\chi\) \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 3: Summary of test scenarios.