Attacking (and Defending) the Maritime Radar System

Abstract

The operation of radar equipment is one of the key facilities navigators use to gather situational awareness about their surroundings. With an ever-increasing need for alwaysrunning logistics and tighter shipping schedules, operators rely more on computerized instruments and their indications. As a result, modern ships have become complex cyber-physical systems in which sensors and computers constantly communicate and coordinate. In this work, we discuss novel threats related to the radar system, one of a ship's most security-sensitive components.In detail, we first discuss some new attacks capable of compromising the integrity of data displayed on a radar system, with potentially catastrophic impacts on the crew's situational awareness or safety. Then, we present a detection system to highlight anomalies in the radar video feed, requiring no modifications to the target ship configuration. Finally, we stimulate our detection system by performing the attacks inside a simulated environment. The experimental results indicate that the attacks are feasible, easy to carry out, and hard to detect. Moreover, they prove that the proposed detection technique is effective.

Electronic Attacks as a Cyber False Flag against Maritime Radars Systems

“…They also describe the category of sophisticated contextaware radar manipulation attacks. Longo et al [4] implement these attacks, which again aligns with the G-1 goal. Notably, their technique enables precise injections into the PPI we use to implement our attacks.…”

“…Attacks exploit the radar hijacking techniques described in [4]. Briefly, radar hijacking involves injecting fake AS-TERIX packets to modify echoes immediately after the PPI receives legitimate values from the antenna.…”

“…Literature works demonstrate examples where malicious individuals have disrupted these systems either by infiltrating the network [4] or by manipulating traffic directly on the radar workstation [5, P.35], [6]. The results of such attacks can include the Denial of Service or manipulating the display, such as adding, deleting, or modifying targets.…”

Comprehensive Analysis of Maritime Cybersecurity Landscape Based on the NIST CSF v2.0

“…Further supporting the role of risk management in the maritime field, another study introduced a threat probability assessment tool [35]. A different perspective on managing risks to radar systems on ships in light of emerging threats was provided by Longo et al [36]. Their study presented a detection system that provides a proactive approach to identifying anomalies in radar video feeds to form a risk management strategy.…”

Bridging the Gap: Enhancing Maritime Vessel Cyber Resilience through Security Operation Centers

“…There has been research that has demonstrated how vulnerabilities inherent in the networking infrastructure can be exploited. Research conducted by [ 19 ] took advantage of the inbuilt weaknesses in the ASTERIX protocol used for radar data transmission to show how malware can be propagated in the INS. Ref.…”