Autonomous shipping and cyber-security - Cyber-security challenges in the maritime domain

Abstract

Numerous big companies and joint projects are showing interest in a future shipping industry that moves towards a crew-less environment where vessels undergo technological improvements aiming to becoming autonomous. With these technological developments also comes vulnerabilities, waiting for external hackers to take advantage of a situation where a ship might be crewless and dependent on connectedness for its navigation. This thesis will focus on the cyber-security challenges and the different potential pathways of cyber-attacks while the industry is heading towards autonomous shipping. The thesis objective has been fulfilled by means of semi-structured interviews with professional representants of leading companies in the field combined with literature studies. The results of the study indicate that the industry has a long way ahead in terms of cyber security and that the necessity of a raised cyber risk awareness level is unavoidable in the future. According to IMO`s “Guidelines on maritime cyber risk management”, risk management has traditionally been focused on physical aspects of the operations and needs to adapt to new challenges as systems rely more and more on network-based systems. Risk awareness needs to include things such as measures to back up and restore systems as well as detection of defiencies. From our interviews it could be concluded that human factors through social engineering is considered to be a week link, combined with a lack of backup plans in case of failure. Further that a “plan b” is missing in autonomous ships without crew that otherwise could try to locate the problem on sight.