Document type
Journal articles
Document subtype
Full paper
Title
A Triggering Mechanism for Cyber-Attacks in Naval Sensors and Systems
Participants in the publication
Walmor Cristino Leite Junior (Author)
Claudio Coreixas de Moraes (Author)
Carlos E. P. de Albuquerque (Author)
Raphael Carlos Santos Machado (Author)
Alan Oliveira de Sá (Author)
Dep. Informática
Summary
In the maritime sector, the integration of radar systems, Automatic Identification System (AIS) and Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) through digital technologies enables several benefits to maritime operations, but also make ships prone to cyberattacks. In this context, this work investigates the feasibility of an attacker using a radar system or AIS as open door to remotely send commands to a cyber threat hosted on a ship, even if the ship’s systems are air gapped—i.e., are not connected to other networks. The received commands are intended to trigger a cyber threat located in the ship. Although the literature covers several analyzes on cyber risks and vulnerabilities in naval systems, it lacks exploiting mechanisms capable of acknowledging attack commands received through radar and AIS. To this end, this work proposes a triggering mechanism that uses a template matching technique to detect specific patterns transmitted by the attacker to the ship’s radar or AIS. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique as a tool to acknowledge the received attack commands and activate a malicious code previously installed on the ship. In the case of attacks on a radar system, the accuracy achieved by the proposed method is 0.90. In the case of attacks on an AIS/ECDIS setup it presents an accuracy of 0.93. In both cases the proposed mechanism maintains the due safety against accidental attack activations.
Date of Publication
2021-05-04
Where published
Sensors
Publication Identifiers
ISSN - 1424-8220
Publisher
MDPI AG
Document Identifiers
DOI -
https://doi.org/10.3390/s21093195
URL -
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21093195
Rankings
Google Metrics (2021) - 126
Keywords
cybersecurity
radar
automatic identification system
electronic chart display and information system
electronic attack
template matching