Hijacking of unmanned surface vehicles: A demonstration of attacks and countermeasures in the field

Abstract

Driven by advances in information and communication technologies, an increasing number of industries embrace unmanned and autonomous vehicles for services, such as public transportation, shipping, mapping, and remote surveillance. Unfortunately, these vehicles are vulnerable to passive and active cyber-physical attacks that can be used for industrial espionage and hijacking attempts. Since attackers can use hijacked vehicles as weapons in terrorist attacks, ensuring the secure operation of such vehicles is critical to prevent the attacks from causing dire financial consequences, or worse, the loss of human lives. This study is motivated by the observation that most cybersecurity studies provide superficial, high-level descriptions of vulnerabilities and attacks, and the true impact of the described attacks remains unclear. To address this problem, we demonstrate advanced manipulation attacks against an underactuated Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) which results in successful hijackings. Using state-of-the-art cryptography, we also show how the signal transmission can be secured to avoid hijacking attempts actively steering the vehicle off course. Through field experiments, we demonstrate how the attacks affect the closed-loop guidance, navigation, and control system and how the proposed countermeasures prevent these attacks from being successful. Our study is unique in that we provide a complete description of the attacked USV and give a detailed analysis of how spoofed navigation estimates affect the closed-loop behavior of the underactuated USV.