"Project Improves Cybersecurity of Global Ship-Tracking System"

Cybersecurity advancements made by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in collaboration with the US Navy could soon help strengthen protection for the Automated Identification System (AIS), which is used to track and identify commercial and military ships all over the world. AIS uses signals from transponders on ships to assist captains in avoiding collisions when the vessels are outside of busy ports. Since AIS is based on an open standard developed many years ago, the US Navy's Battlespace Awareness and Information Operations Program Office recognized that the system needed to be hardened to help address current cybersecurity conditions and expectations. GTRI researchers were initially asked to assess the system's potential vulnerabilities and then develop Bifrost, an add-on software system that works with AIS to filter messages from ships, protect against potentially malicious messaging, and provide critical alerts to ship captains. The Navy's Battlespace Awareness and Information Operations Program Office has received the Bifrost system, which is now being evaluated as a step toward potential deployment. The goal of AIS is to avoid collisions and enable everyone to work together to contribute information about where their ship is and which way it is heading so that everyone can predict where it will be, explained Shelby Allen, the project's lead GTRI research scientist. Trusting the information provided is critical to ensuring the safety of global maritime traffic. Along with GPS, AIS is critical to how forces operate across the seas. Due to the critical nature of the communications, the Bifrost system was designed to extract useful information from ship transmissions even if they do not meet all of the protocol specifications. Bifrost can detect deliberate misinformation, such as location updates that suggest speeds that vessels cannot achieve. Aside from cybersecurity hardening, Bifrost improves how the system handles emergency alerts, which may not be visible enough in the original AIS interface. This article continues to discuss the development, capabilities, and goals of GTRI's Bifrost system. 

GTRI reports "Project Improves Cybersecurity of Global Ship-Tracking System"