CyberShip: An SDN-Based Autonomic Attack Mitigation Framework for Ship Systems

Abstract

The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the ship communication network brings new security vulnerabilities and make communication links a potential target for various kinds of cyber physical attacks, which results in the degradation of the performance. Moreover, crew members are burdened with the task of configuring the network devices with low-level device specific syntax for mitigating the attacks. Heavy reliance on the crew members and additional software and hardware devices makes the mitigation difficult and time consuming process. Recently, the emergence of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a solution to reduce the complexity in the network management tasks. To explore the advantages of using SDN, we propose a framework based on SDN and a use case to mitigate the attacks in an automated way for improved resilience in the ship communication network.