Towards Security Assurance of an Autonomous Ship Group - Event

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Abstract: The increasing adoption of unmanned systems raises the challenge of the prevention of unauthorised access to them for nancial gain or malicious intent. The problem is exacerbated for maritime systems which are intentionally operated at considerable physical distance from the data or asset owner. The success of a naval mission is subject to the ful lment of a set of operational requirements before and during each voyage. As these requirements depend essentially on the maritime system components and the mission pro le, the e ects of failures can be very signi cant if they are not anticipated. In this paper, we use systems-theoretic process analysis (STPA) to develop a systematic mechanism to analyse the security functionalities of a fully autonomous ship. STPA is a hazard analysis technique capable of identifying potential hazardous design flaws, including software and system design errors and unsafe interactions among multiple system components. As part of the process analysis, we identified potential threats, vulnerabilities and attacks in an autonomous ship. The analyses can be used as a springboard to drive an autonomous ship system architecture and to designing a more e ective and secure system.