Not an Accident: Exploiting Safety Filter Inadequacy in Humanoid Robots

Overview & Synopsis

As humanoid robots move from research laboratories toward deployment in human-centered environments such as homes, hospitals, and warehouses, safe operation around nearby people and objects becomes a fundamental requirement. Safety filters have emerged as a promising technique to address this challenge by providing mathematical guarantees that generated control actions do not result in collisions. This paper shows that these guarantees hold only when the safety parameters are configured correctly. However, correct parameter configurations are task- and environment-specific, and no general method exists to determine them across diverse deployments. As a result, safety filters shipped with humanoid robots can fail after deployment in specific scenarios. We show that attackers can exploit these failures through only normal user interactions without any additional privileges or capabilities. To demonstrate this risk, we present goal insertion attacks and develop SIREN, an automated tool that identifies vulnerable inserting goals for a given task and environment. Experimental results show that SIREN identifies attacks in all vulnerable scenarios in the SPARK dataset. Compared with a baseline approach, SIREN discovers three times as many attacks. We also show that SIREN is able to generate attacks against a real humanoid and cause it to collide while executing tasks. These results demonstrate that current safety filters introduce exploitable vulnerabilities that can cause safety violations, which reveals that existing safety mechanisms can themselves become a source of safety risk for humanoid robots.