Message authentication codes for secure remote non-native client connections to ROS enabled robots

Recent work in the robotics community has lead to the emergence of cloud-based solutions and remote clients. Such work allows robots to effectively distribute complex computations across multiple machines, and allows remote clients, both human and automata, to control robots across the globe. With the increasing use and importance of such ideas, it is crucial not to overlook the critical issue of security in these systems. In this work, we discuss the use of web tokens for achieving secure authentication for remote, non-native clients in the widely-used Robot Operating System (ROS) middleware. Written in a system-independent manner, we demonstrate its use with an application for securing clients within the popular rosbridge protocol.