Surgical robots are used every day to perform complex, minimally invasive procedures with great precision and control. They could also one day make care more accessible to rural patients, soldiers on the battlefield, even deep-sea or outer-space explorers — if the potential of remote operation can be realized.
The catch: These robots can be vulnerable to cyberattacks and network instability that could cause them to malfunction, harming patients.
“Surgical robots were originally introduced with the vision of making telesurgery possible in the future,” said Homa Alemzadeh , an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science. “However, the challenges of network security and reliability and overall robot resilience have still not made this possible in practice.”
In 2016, Alemzadeh, then a Ph.D. candidate, proposed solutions to the security problem in her paper “Targeted Attacks on Teleoperated Surgical Robots: Dynamic Model-Based Detection and Mitigation.”
Now, she’s received the DSN 2026 Test-of-Time Award , which recognizes papers published a decade earlier that have had a “sustained and important impact on the theory and/or practice of dependable systems and networks.”
The paper pioneered the idea of anticipating the consequences of robot control commands in the cyber layer before they execute in the physical world and mitigating malicious commands before they compromise safety.
“I think what’s made this research timeless, and still relevant a decade later, is that core idea,” Alemzadeh said.
The work highlighted the importance of cybersecurity in medical robotics and laid the groundwork for later efforts to secure robotic surgical systems. It also set Alemzadeh’s career trajectory and became the basis for a 2022 National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
Alemzadeh accepted the award in June at DSN 2026, the 56th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“Seeing the research that capped off my Ph.D. journey stand the test of time and continue to shape the field of dependable systems and the safety of medical cyber-physical systems feels like a real honor,” she said.
“This work was very much a team effort with my Ph.D. advisors and colleagues at the University of Illinois, so my first reaction was wanting to share the news with them.”
Alemzadeh joined the faculty of UVA’s Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2017.
Cyber-physical systems, control and robotics are among the electrical and computer engineering department’s research strengths . They also advance the mission of UVA Engineering’s Link Lab , where Alemzadeh leads the Dependable Systems and Analytics group.
“One can’t overstate Homa’s significant contributions to the advancement of cybersecurity in teleoperated robotic surgery over the past decade,” said American Telephone and Telegraph Company Professor of Engineering Scott Acton , who chairs the department. “Her research is a shining example of UVA’s strength in electrical and computer engineering.”
Alemzadeh’s research came at a time when surgical robots were all the rage.
“In 2016, surgical robots were booming in popularity, with tens of thousands of robotic procedures performed in the U.S. each year,” she explained. “Our research asked a then-uncomfortable question: ‘How resilient are these robots against adversaries?’”
The answer they found was: Not nearly resilient enough.
Alemzadeh and her co-authors showed that teleoperated surgical robots could be vulnerable to sophisticated cyberattacks that impact a surgeon’s control of the machine. They demonstrated that an attacker could exploit weaknesses in a robot’s control system, identify critical moments during a procedure and inject malicious commands that bypass safety checks.
In tests, the attacks caused dangerous robot behavior, including sudden movements of robotic arms and unexpected system shutdowns — events that could potentially lead to patient injury, damage to equipment or interruption of surgery.
The team proposed a real-time “safety engine” using a physics model of the robot to “continuously predict the consequence of each software command before it executes on the robotic arms,” Alemzadeh said.
“In our experiments, the engine detected and stopped malicious commands with improved accuracy and timeliness compared to existing safety checks.”
In fact, the system identified and blocked such commands with an average accuracy of 90%.
“This model-based, physics-aware approach to detecting and mitigating faults and attacks has become foundational across cyber-physical systems security,” she said.
“And the threat surface we analyzed has only grown to be more realistic, as medical robots and devices are far more complex and connected today than they were 10 years ago.”
As new threats surface, there’s always more work to be done to make surgical robots safer, and Alemzadeh’s current work is still founded on that basic idea — bridging the gap between cybersecurity and physical safety, and physics-aware detection and mitigation in cyber-physical systems.
While Alemzadeh’s team still aims to make telesurgery a reality , her research has evolved.
“My lab and collaborators have investigated other classes of threats, such as operational errors, adversarial sensor perturbations and transient hardware faults, along with methods for context-aware runtime safety assurance in a broader set of autonomous systems and intelligent medical devices,” Alemzadeh said.
“That need has only grown as machine learning and artificial intelligence have become more integrated into cyber-physical systems and robots.”