Dude, Where’s That Ship? Stealthy Radio Attacks Against AIS Broadcasts

The Maritime Transportation System (MTS) is the foundation of global trade, a crucial pillar of our economy’s supply chains, but also critical to energy and food security. At the same time, it is increasingly exposed to new types of threats. These include attacks from the cyber and electromagnetic spectrum against various information and telecommunications systems on board vessels as the backbone of the MTS. The radio-based Automatic Identification System (AIS) is one of these systems, used to monitor ship routes and for traffic planning, and supports collision avoidance on the vessel side. The technical vulnerabilities of the system have long been known and caution is therefore advised. Conventional attacks are usually easy to recognize, so that disruptions to operations can occur, but serious damage can be limited. In this paper, however, we present a novel radio-based attack on AIS that enables to selectively suppress identification messages of individual ships and thus to manipulate the situational awareness on the vessel’s bridge in a stealthy manner, which can have catastrophic impacts in critical situations. We demonstrate the technical feasibility of this attack in a laboratory environment with real hardware and, by elaborating this vulnerability, we are contributing to increasing the resilience of the maritime domain against evolving hybrid threats.