IoT Security In The C-3PO Age Will Be A Bit Different: Analysis

The real-world demo of Tesla’s humanoid Optimus robot suggests hackers may soon have a whole new attack surface to try to exploit.

Get ready to meet your newest home IoT device, C-3PO.

Last night in Burbank, Calif., Elon Musk offered a real-world demo of Tesla’s much-anticipated Optimus bots, letting the humanoid robots loose to mingle amongst event goers (and serve them drinks).

While it’s not clear if the drinks were any good, we do know one thing: Optimus has been trained in a variety of crucial hand signals.

I guess we should’ve seen this coming, given that we’ve already had R2-D2s roaming around some cities delivering food. It was only a matter of time before R2 was going to get a bipedal buddy with conversational abilities.

And as Wedbush’s Dan Ives wrote in a note to investors today, it’s now clear the Optimus bot is “potentially much closer to a reality that we thought heading into the event.”

That also means, of course, that we’re potentially about to head into a bizarre new phase when it comes to cybersecurity and privacy.

I’ll put aside the obvious privacy concerns to simply note that when it comes to security, a walking, talking robot is a very different type of connected device.

The “Westworld”-style nightmare scenarios from a hacked humanoid robot are of course easy to imagine. Comparisons with the killer humanoids from “I, Robot” have been abundant for Tesla’s Optimus robot (thanks in no small part to Tesla calling last night’s event, “We, Robot”).

But it’s barely harder to envision some of the more routine ways that a highly mobile IoT device, whose cameras and mics are presumably going to be on much of the time and pointed straight at you, could be of use to malicious actors.

What we of course don’t know yet is how common these robots, expected to be priced at around $20,000 to $30,000, will actually become. It’s also too early to tell how long it might take competitors to produce lower-priced alternatives that would be more likely to cut corners on security.

But we can probably assume the C-3PO age — or more cynically, the “I, Robot” or “Westworld” age — is in fact coming, and that this will mean contending with a whole new attack surface. An attack surface that can also make you drinks.