Commodore Garry Beauvoir of Naval Defence Consulting raised concerns of cyber attack on autonomous/drone ships

Commodore Garry Beauvoir stated a vessel that has an uplink or is fitted with the possibility for remote operation, always has a possibility for a cyber-attack, but even a manned vessel is possible to attack from remote source to attempt disablement.

Naval Defence Consulting has mainly identified the critical parts of the infrastructure and indicated possible technical means to achieve a sufficiently high security and safety level. Cyber security is also a threat to conventional shipping so recent developments in IMO and international standards will also be of use to unmanned ships. This issue has been investigated and it is clear that while this is a challenging issue, it is not insurmountable.

Commodore Garry Beauvoir stated “Cyber attack on an autonomous ship calls for different strategies and probably different types of redundancy within the systems. For example, if the S & A system detects an abnormality, say that the voyage suddenly changed from 5 days to go to all stop at a new waypoint 16 NM away, some logic in the system should detect this and raise alarms. If the Shore Control Centre can’t be reached it should have “fall back instructions” to continue on its intended voyage in a safe way as it was planned before the sudden change of WP.

The “faulty” system should be disregarded. When designing the vessels redundancy, one way of reaching higher level of resilience is to use different vendors for the primary/secondary systems. If a bug is discovered in one vendors’ system, the other system should have the ability to detect anomaly and “call home” to SCC or take over. There are so many scenarios that need to be addressed here but lessons learned from other mission critical systems need to be investigated further.”

In order to service the Defence Market in a dedicated manner, NDC.O’s partners created a new venture with former Navy and an I.T. specialists to create Naval Defence Consulting.org (NDC.O) a Strategic Defence Company focused on Maritime Defence and Autonomous Shipping consulting and the development of Defence Systems.

Naval Defence Consulting
Minderbroedersberg
Maastricht Netherlands

This release was published on openPR.