The title of my summer project is Maritime Cybersecurity. While the original title is very open, I soon narrowed my research down to one clear weakness in the maritime sector – the dependency on GNSS technology, such as GPS. Unencrypted GPS signals used by vessels, including invaluable cargo ships, are easily jammed or spoofed by attackers. This means that the ability of the ship to determine its location is either completely denied, or the ship’s reported location is shown to be somewhere where the ship is not. Without knowing a ships location, the chances of the vessel being the victim of a physical attack or accidental damage increase dramatically. These issues are amplified when considering the not-so-distant implementation of autonomous ships as the lack of crew means that other traditional navigation methods, notably celestial navigation, are not an option. With this in mind, I dedicated my internship into researching and trying to create methods of detecting when an autonomous ship has been the victim of a GPS attack, and the measures which could be put in place to determine a ship’s location once an attack has been discovered.
