Trust and Social Engineering in Human Robot Interaction: Will a Robot Make You Disclose Sensitive Information, Conform to Its Recommendations or Gamble?

Robots such as information security and overtrust in them are gaining increasing relevance. This research aims at giving an insight into how trust toward robots could be exploited for the purpose of social engineering. Drawing on Mitnick's model, a well-known social engineering framework, an interactive scenario with the humanoid robot iCub was designed to emulate a social engineering attack. At first, iCub attempted to collect the kind of personal information usually gathered by social engineers by asking a series of private questions. Then, the robot tried to develop trust and rapport with participants by offering reliable clues during a treasure hunt game. At the end of the treasure hunt, the robot tried to exploit the gained trust in order to make participants gamble the money they won. The results show that people tend to build rapport with and trust toward the robot, resulting in the disclosure of sensitive information, conformation to its suggestions and gambling.