The Data Distribution Service (DDS) provides data-centric publish-subscribe messaging with a mandatory discovery protocol, enabling distributed applications to automatically locate and communicate with each other. ROS 2, the de facto middleware for robotic systems, adopts DDS as its communication backbone. In this paper, we demonstrate that the DDS discovery mechanism can be exploited to mount Denial-of-Service attacks against ROS 2 applications. By repeatedly triggering discovery traffic, an adversary can significantly inflate pipeline latency during runtime. We validate the attack on ROS 2 Humble with two widely used DDS implementations and a real UAV case study, confirming its effectiveness across different configurations.

ROS (Robot Operating System) is a widely used robotic software development framework. In safety-critical applications that require timing guarantees, the first generation of ROS falls short. The introduction of ROS 2 has addressed some of these limitations, but its multi-threaded executor still struggles to meet real-time requirements. To address this issue, we design a new multi-threaded executor called RTeX for ROS 2. The goal of RTeX is to improve system performance in terms of both run-time efficiency and timing predictability. We have implemented RTeX in the latest version of ROS 2 and conducted experiments on a real platform. The experimental results demonstrate that RTeX outperforms both the default ROS 2 multi-threaded executor and its state-of-the-art variant, achieving significant real-time performance improvements.