Adversarial waypoint injection attacks on Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) collision avoidance systems

Autonomous navigation is currently subject to particular interest for naval and commercial vessels. In addition to the regulatory effort, several pieces of research tackled the development of new guidance laws, stable and robust control algorithms, methodologies to increase situational awareness, and collision avoidance algorithms. However, most of these systems blindly trust information from navigation sensors, which can malfunction or, even worse, have their data altered by cyber-attacks. This last scenario will be increasingly common shortly and represents a dangerous threat that future highly computerised ships must face. The proposed work shows an approach capable of hijacking a state-of-the-art collision avoidance algorithm route by feeding it with rogue data. The effects of such a cyber-attack are shown via an extensive simulation campaign, testing the methodology on three different COLREG scenarios: head-on, crossing, and overtaking. The study additionally highlights the susceptibility of forthcoming navigation systems to security breaches, which still needs to be addressed in the existing literature. According to the experimental findings, attackers can attract the autonomous ship guidance toward their objective at a mean distance of 133m. Finally, suggestions on how to harden these systems against this family of attacks are provided in the conclusion.