Your robots talk to each other over a network that, by default, asks nobody for a password. Turning that on is a certificate project, and it belongs with whoever runs your identity system. Your robotics engineers have a different job.
Three facts that are true on the day you read this
9.8
The severity score on CVE-2026-8153, an unauthenticated takeover of the Universal Robots PolyScope 5 controller, published by the vendor in May 2026 and fixed in 5.25.1.
None
The number of middleware security features switched on in a default ROS 2 install. Those are the words of the project's own design documentation.
110
Security controls still required on defense work after the Pentagon paused CMMC Phase 2 on 13 July 2026. The assessment was suspended. The controls were not.
None of those is a statistic about robotics companies in general. Each one has a name and a date on it, so you can go and check it yourself.
The layer underneath your robots
What the middleware and the manufacturers put in writing
Everything in this section comes from the Robot Operating System design documentation or from a robot manufacturer's own advisory. Where something is our opinion, it says so.
ROS 2 and the network under it
Security is off until somebody turns it on
ROS 2 carries its data over DDS, a publish and subscribe transport, and DDS has a full security specification behind it. The ROS 2 design documentation is direct about the default: none of those security features are enabled. Until an environment variable turns it on, nodes in a domain find each other and exchange data with no authentication and no encryption. On an isolated bench that is a reasonable default. On a network that also carries payroll, it is a flat network with robots on it.
Turning it on is a certificate project
The DDS security specification defines five plugin interfaces and ROS 2 implements three of them: authentication, access control, and cryptography. Standing that up means running two certificate authorities, one for identity and one for permissions, issuing an X.509 certificate and private key to every participant, signing a governance file and a permissions file for each, and distributing a keystore to every robot and every developer machine. Then rotating all of it when somebody leaves. That is public key infrastructure work, and it is the same discipline as the identity system your staff already log into.
Discovery ignores your network diagram
Participants find each other automatically inside a domain, and a domain is just a number. Two teams on the same subnet who both left the domain at its default will see each other's topics without either of them intending it. We have watched a demo rig subscribe to a colleague's test data because of exactly this. Assigning domains deliberately and segmenting the network underneath costs very little and is usually the first thing missing.
Pin the distribution, then plan the jump
Lyrical Luth arrived in May 2026 as a Long Term Support release and is supported until May 2031. The previous long term release, Jazzy Jalisco from May 2024, is where most fleets sit today. A move between them is a scheduled project with a test rig and a rollback, and the cost of not scheduling it is discovering the deadline on the morning a dependency stops building. We track the support dates for the versions you run and put the jump in a plan before it becomes urgent.
The cell, the lab and the bench
An arm on the business network is an arm on the internet
In May 2026 Universal Robots published CVE-2026-8153, a command injection flaw in the PolyScope 5 Dashboard Server. It scores 9.8 out of 10, and an attacker who can reach the port over the network needs no credentials to run commands on the controller. The United States cyber defense agency carried it as advisory ICSA-26-134-17. The fix is PolyScope 5.25.1 or newer. Collaborative arms of this kind sit in demo rooms and test cells at a great many robotics companies, including firms who build something else entirely and use one to test it.
The vendor's own advice is a network job
For anyone who cannot patch immediately, Universal Robots lists three compensating controls in its own advisory. The first is to "minimize network exposure of the robot" and to "place the robot and other control system devices behind firewalls and isolate them from business networks". The second is to switch off the Dashboard Server if the application does not use it. The third is to restrict access to specific trusted hosts or a subnet. Read that list again and notice who does that work. None of it is robotics engineering. All of it is the separation your meta description already promises and your network probably does not have.
The machines that never made it onto a list
The arm in the demo room. The bench running an overnight soak test. The single board computer taped to a frame by an intern two summers ago that is still answering on port 22. These are the machines that never appear on an asset list and never get patched, and they are plugged into whatever was closest. We start with an inventory of everything connected, then segment, then decide case by case which of them has any business reaching the internet at all. Most do not.
Simulation machines are not office laptops
Perception training, physics simulation and rendering care about graphics driver versions in a way that an ordinary laptop policy does not respect. An unattended driver update in the middle of a multi-day training run costs the run. We pin driver versions and set a change window on the machines that need it, and leave the office fleet on the normal update track, so one policy does not have to serve two very different jobs. Where the work has outgrown the desk, we will price the cloud option including the part where it costs more than the desk did.
The paperwork behind the product
Four sets of questions, and the one nobody regulates arrives with the least notice
Robotics companies get asked to prove things by people with very different levels of patience. Some of the answers are IT deliverables wearing a regulatory label, so they tend to land on the wrong desk a week before they are due. Open whichever apply.
If you make a medical device
On 2 February 2026 the rule at 21 CFR Part 820 stopped being the 1996 Quality System Regulation and became the Quality Management System Regulation, which incorporates ISO 13485:2016 by reference. The Food and Drug Administration retired its old inspection technique on the same date. Running alongside that, and in force since March 2023, section 524B of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act applies to any device with software that can connect to a network. It asks for a software bill of materials covering commercial, open source and off-the-shelf components, a plan for finding and disclosing vulnerabilities after the device ships, and a commitment to patch. The current final guidance is dated 27 June 2025. A bill of materials and a working patch pipeline are IT deliverables that end up inside a regulatory submission.
If your work touches export control
Most people believe controlled technical data cannot go in ordinary cloud services. Since 25 March 2020 that has not been the rule. The provision at 22 CFR 120.54(a)(5) treats end to end encrypted technical data as not exported, provided the encryption meets the federal standard or a comparable strength, the means of decryption are never handed to any third party including the cloud provider itself, and the data is not intentionally stored in a proscribed country or in Russia. Data crossing the internet does not count as stored. What that buys is ordinary tooling under specific conditions, and every one of those conditions is a configuration decision that has to be made and written down. Take it as a reason to talk to your export counsel, not as legal advice from an IT firm.
If you sell to defense
The Pentagon suspended the second phase of its cybersecurity certification program on 13 July 2026 and opened a sixty day review, which moved the start date that had been set for 10 November. A lot of firms read the headline and stopped. The obligations underneath did not move: the contract clause at DFARS 252.204-7012 still requires the 110 controls in the federal standard for protecting controlled unclassified information, the clause at DFARS 252.204-7021 still requires an annual affirmation of where you stand, and FAR 52.204-21 still applies to everyone. The assessment was paused. The requirement was not. If you were behind in June, you are behind now with more time.
If you are raising, or selling to anyone large
Nobody regulates this one, which is why it arrives with no notice and a two week deadline. A diligence pack and an enterprise vendor review ask the same short list of questions. Who holds administrator rights. What happened to the access of the engineer who left in March. Where the source code and the design files live and who can reach them. Whether multifactor covers every account or only the ones that were easy. Whether you can perform a restore in front of someone or only describe one. The work behind those answers is the same work either way. The only variable is whether you assemble it in a panic or hand over something you already keep current.
The tools behind all of this are named in full, vendor by vendor, on the monitoring page: what runs on the machines, and who picks up an alert at three in the morning.
Who we do this for
Robotics and hardware clients in the Bay Area
Ekso Bionics
Four servers retired from 2022 onward, and an expensive firewall with them, which saved them thousands. Nobody has to go through the central office to log in and reach what they need, and the security posture improved on both the workstations and the network. An acquisition that included an office in another state was moved into the network and infrastructure without any issues, and every SOX audit has been completed successfully with our team behind it.
Next door to this work
Robotics companies sit alongside the engineering firms we support, and the problems overlap more than either group expects: large files that have to move, and licensed software that stops the whole floor when one server goes down. Dean Lewis Associates went from nine servers to one and took 25 to 30 thousand dollars a year off the bill. There is more on the engineering page and on the AEC hub.
Common questions
Is ROS 2 secure out of the box?
No, and the project documents that openly. The more useful question is what to do about it, because switching everything on is not always the right first move. For a fleet that never leaves one building, most of the exposure closes at the network layer, for a fraction of the effort. Where robots go out to customer sites, or a regulator is going to ask, the full certificate setup earns its keep. Either way it needs an owner outside the robotics team. Rotating keys when an engineer leaves is an identity job, and identity jobs get dropped when they live with whoever last edited a config file.
Do our robots and test rigs need to be on a separate network?
Usually. The objection we hear is that they need internet access for updates and telemetry, so separation sounds like unplugging them. It is not. It means an arm can reach the two addresses it needs and nothing further, and that an attacker who lands on a laptop in accounts cannot reach the arm at all. The manufacturers ask for this themselves, as Universal Robots did in its May 2026 advisory. The first step is finding out what is connected, and in most workshops that list runs longer than anyone expects.
Can we keep export controlled technical data in Microsoft 365 or a normal cloud drive?
Often, yes, and assuming you cannot is the more expensive mistake. The provision is at 22 CFR 120.54(a)(5) and it has read this way since 2020. It turns on your encryption and on who can decrypt, not on the brand of service you buy. In practice that becomes a short list of settings that need an owner: where the tenant keeps data, and who holds the keys. We configure those and write down what was done, so your export counsel has something to sign off on. Two things trip firms up here. A compliance badge on a product is not the same as your own configuration being right. Who can reach the data matters as much as where it sits, because a person who should not see it is a problem in any location.
We build a medical device. What changed in February 2026?
Your quality team has almost certainly briefed you on the regulation itself. The part worth your attention is how much of it lands on IT and not on quality. A software bill of materials has to be produced by something, and that something is your build pipeline. A commitment to patch after the device ships means a release process that still works three years from now, against hardware already in the field. An auditor then asks for evidence that both were real, and evidence means records kept at the time. That is the part nobody can assemble retroactively in the week before an inspection, and it is where we tend to get called in late.
Does CMMC still apply after the July 2026 suspension?
The certification was paused on 13 July 2026. The obligation was not, and nothing in the contracts you have already signed changed that day. So the practical answer is that the suspension bought time and nothing else. If you were compliant, stay compliant and keep your annual affirmation current, because that clause did not pause either. If you were behind, this is the cheapest window you are going to get: the control work takes months done properly, and assessor capacity was already scarce before a queue built up behind a pause. Treating a pause as a cancellation just moves the same work into a worse month.
What should a robotics company look for in an IT provider?
Ask three questions. Can they name the middleware your robots run on and tell you what its security posture is when nobody has configured it. What would they do about a test cell that cannot be taken down for patching this quarter. Who fills in the security questionnaire your biggest customer just sent, and how long will it take. Most managed IT is written for offices, and an office answer to any of those three is easy to hear. You are looking for a provider who has already met the problem, not one who will learn on your equipment.
Which of your test rigs is on the business network?
