Security of the Cyber Enabled Ship

Abstract

The maritime industry is actively engaged with developing remotely controlled and autonomous ships to sail in the near future. Remotely controlled and autonomous vessels have the potential to transform the maritime transport sector and to constitute the instantiation of the Industry 4.0 process in the maritime industry, termed “Shipping 4.0”. Both remotely controlled and autonomous vessels are variants of the Cyber-Enabled Ship (C-ES), and comprise a number of interconnected Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) that perform functions critical to the safe operation of the vessel. This proliferation of the use of integrated Information Technology and Operational Technology systems that aims to maximize the reliability and efficiency of a number of the vessel’s operations, including vessel navigation, introduces previously unknown security risks that, in view of the significance of the sector to transportation and commerce, are important to address. The overall objective of this research is to determine the security architecture of the C-ES seen as a system of CPSs, i.e. to provide a cohesive security design, which addresses the requirements - and in particular the risks of the C-ES, and specifies what security controls are to be applied where. Accordingly, the main research questions that the work described in this thesis addressed are as follows: • What is a reference system architecture for the C-ES? • What are the cyber security and safety risks and requirements of the C-ES? • What is an appropriate security architecture for the C-ES? In the course of addressing these research questions, we researched several aspects of the process of analyzing the security of CPSs and we proposed methods and approaches for carrying out such analysis. We thus effectively proposed a domain-agnostic approach for studying the security of complex interconnected CPSs, and we demonstrated its applicability to the case of the C-ES. Specifically, we proposed methods for analyzing threats, attacks, attack paths, and risks of interconnected CPSs; for systematically selecting baseline security controls for individual CPSs; for eliciting security and safety requirements; and for selecting optimal sets of security controls for complex interconnected CPSs. We also proposed a reference architecture that can represent the C-ES in the maritime domain ecosystem, and a reference architecture for a cyber-physical range. These results have been published in five journal articles and three articles in conference proceedings; these constitute the second part of the thesis.