Digital Forensic Investigation Framework for Marine Industry

A massive 400% increase of cyber-attacks was reported in the Marine industry since February 2020 up to date. Experiments and research are being conducted towards safeguarding data in various technological aspects of the marine environment with regards to navigation, transportation and system management. At present, generic investigation processes are developed for computer incidents and forensic readiness in this sector, but those do not describe the investigation process precisely. Although there are incident analysis technologies implemented for the Marine environment, it lacks reliable digital forensic tools for evidence extraction and analysis. Therefore, in this research, a comprehensive digital forensic investigation framework is proposed, answering the issues of existing frameworks, and a tool is implemented for the examination of navigational evidence. Forensic procedures of existing investigation methodologies were taken into consideration when developing the fusion framework. The Marine Geo Navigator was implemented with the technologies of Machine Learning and Visualization to evaluate geolocations and paths of vessels. Through expert analysis, the proposed investigation framework was verified as a suitable process to be utilized in the Marine industry and the tool was validated resulting an acceptable level of accuracy.