Trust Management and Attribute-Based Access Control Framework for

Protecting Maritime Cyber Infrastructure

Yunpeng Zhang

, Izzat Alsmadi

, Yi Qi

and Zhixia Li

Information Science Technology Department, University of Houston, Houston, U.S.A.

Department of Computing and Cybersecurity Texas A & M University San Antonio, San Antonio, U.S.A.

Department of Transportation Studies, Texas Southern University, Houston, U.S.A.

Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering and Construction Management,

University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, U.S.A.

Keywords:

Security, Maritime Cyber Infrastructure, Attribute-Based Access Control, Framework.

Abstract:

The modern world depends on maritime supply chains to sustain ﬂows of international commercial, industrial,

and economic activities. As the maritime supply chain heavily utilizes cyber operations to manage commu-

nications and physical processes, maritime cybersecurity emerges as an imperative aspect for maritime safety

and security. The maritime cyber infrastructure displays distributed, heterogeneous, networked, and volatile

characteristics. This article ﬁrst studies the effectiveness of the mechanism of traditional access control sys-

tems for maritime cyber infrastructure. The research also examines the shortcomings associated with the

existing network wide access control and identity theories to develop solutions. In order to develop a suitable

method for the maritime context, the paper presents an Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) framework

which is adaptable and highly scalable for the complex maritime cyber space. The analytical results show that

implementing the new framework can enhance the access control of the maritime cyber infrastructure.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, more critical infrastructure systems are

managed through cyber operations. Cybersecurity, as

a result, has become a crucial operational domain for

these critical infrastructure systems to prepare for po-

tential cyber-attacks, ensure trustable services, repair

damages, and improve security and operational per-

formance. Breaches in the cyber space of a critical

infrastructure may lead to a variety of consequences.

Speciﬁcally, cyber-attacks can cause disruptions of

the infrastructure systems, leakage of crucial informa-

tion of people and assets, ﬁnancial losses, economic

damages, and even injuries or losses of lives.

The critical infrastructure studied in this research

is the maritime cyber infrastructure. The maritime

transportation system is categorized by the experts

in public and private sectors as a critical infrastruc-

ture system. In any single moment, tremendous

values of commodities, merchandises, as well as

many people, depend on the maritime infrastructure

to travel in global supply chains to support the eco-

nomic, military, or humanitarian systems. The cyber

space of the maritime infrastructure is an extremely

complex ”system of systems”. The maritime cyber

infrastructure includes, but is not limited to: net-

worked facilities, software programs, operating sys-

tems, database servers, large-scale data storage, and

local/remote instruments, wired/wireless sensors, so-

phisticated workforce, personnel, and wired/wireless

and/or satellite networks that connect to other criti-

cal infrastructures. This globally distributed, inter-

connected ecosystem presents unique security chal-

lenges to control both physical and cyber maritime

operations.

Maritime cyber space has been shown to be highly

vulnerable from attacks targeted by various adversar-

ial groups. The attacks may be performed by hack-

ers, criminals, terrorists, international forces, and so

forth. The recent maritime attacks caused the global

economy around $7 billion USD and multiple losses

of lives.(A. Bowden and Lee, 2010) According to

multiple reports (Keefe, 2012; Hayes, 2016; Belmont,

2015; Wagstaff, 2014), the emerging organized cyber

attacks presents new threats to both cyber and physi-

cal maritime operations. A hacking incident in 2001

caused severe Denial of Service problems for the Port

of Houston authority (BBC, 2003). In 2011-2013, in-

534

Zhang, Y., Alsmadi, I., Qi, Y. and Li, Z.

Trust Management and Attribute-Based Access Control Framework for Protecting Maritime Cyber Infrastructure.

DOI: 10.5220/0012126500003538

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2023), pages 534-539

ISBN: 978-989-758-665-1; ISSN: 2184-2833

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

ternational drug trafﬁckers worked with local hack-

ers to intrude the maritime cyber spaces at the Port

of Antwerp, Belgium. The criminals IT weaknesses

and manipulate sensitive data such as shipment char-

acteristics and pickup schedules to conceal drugs and

illegally import them without being detected.

An alarming trend is the emerging cyber-physical

attacks against maritime ICT systems. In the Antwerp

case, hackers breached physical communication ma-

chines to intrude the port’s database. These multi-

plex, organized attacks underscore the importance to

secure the maritime cyber operations in the ﬁrst space

to safeguard the physical safety of people and goods.

Finding effective solutions and countermeasures

against cyber-attacks now becomes an urgent task for

maritime stakeholders. (Vanek et al., 2013) In a vul-

nerable cyber space, access control is a fundamen-

tal mechanism to prevent not only accidental but also

malicious violations of security requirements. An ac-

cess control system regulates user access to resources.

It deﬁnes the conditions under which to whom access

to resources can be granted. Each access request will

result in an access decision such as permit or deny.

This research contributes to the maritime supply

chain security literature by developing a system of

trustable access control. Within the maritime supply

chain, data always moves between extensively dis-

tributed machines and cannot possibly be controlled

by a single, trustable system. To address this chal-

lenge, this paper builds an access control framework

which can simultaneously achieve efﬁciency.

The remaining of the paper is organized into three

additional sections. In section 2, the related work

is discussed to provide the basis for framework and

approach development. Section 3 introduces the ac-

cess control framework for protecting maritime cyber

infrastructure. Section 4 presents the concluding re-

marks and directions of future work.

2 RELATED WORK

In the area of maritime operations and information se-

curity literature, papers regarding maritime cyberse-

curity, especially topics on access control, are few in

numbers. In contrast, there is a wealth of publications

associated with access control innovations and appli-

cations (C. Wang and Gupta, 2023; Singh et al., 2022;

Jeong and Li, 2022). Accordingly, we extensively re-

viewed recent access control publications deemed rel-

evant to maritime cyber operations.

The authors examine and discuss the literature

through the lens of the computer security policy

(CSP), the supreme principle to govern the goals and

elements of the computer systems within an organiza-

tion. (Li et al., 2015) For a normal maritime supply

chain, multiple CSPs may co-exist because of the par-

ticipation of various supply chain partners. The for-

mulation of any CSP is important because it deﬁnes

what it means to be secured within the organization

boundaries.

In the following discussion, we ﬁrst discuss the

recent trends of maritime cyber-attacks. Secondly, we

discuss the state-of-the-art research on access control

and gaps and potentials for applications in maritime

cyber spaces. Finally, the CSPs of a trust management

system to verify maritime cybersecurity is presented

(Panos et al., 2020; Gupta et al., 2023; Fasoulis and

Kurt, 2019).

2.1 Recent Trends of Cyber Attacks

against Maritime Industries

Modern maritime industries are heavily reliant on the

information and communication technologies and the

use of data. On the one hand, this represents a shift

towards safer,more efﬁcient and proﬁtable operations.

For example, more and more maritime supply chain

partners have increased the use of e-bills of lading,

and port authorities have capitalized on computerized

systems for the container operations across sharing

economies. However, this greater reliance on tech-

nologies also brings increased risks in physical and

cyber maritime domains. (Brasington and Hadwin,

2016) As clearly stated in (Bull, 2016), “There is also

a very real danger that emails being sent to and from

ships are monitored or altered. This could have a huge

commercial effect on vessels.”

More speciﬁcally, vessels for both passengers and

cargo transportation are equipped with navigation

and communication technologies, such as Electronic

Charter Display & Information System (ECDIS),

Global Positioning System (GPS), Automatic Iden-

tiﬁcation System (AIS), Industrial Control System

(ICS), and so on. Currently, all of these systems can

be inﬁltrated by cyber attackers. In fact, cyber-attacks

are happening more frequently in the maritime sector

according to various maritime reports s (Bull, 2016;

MTI, 2017; Vamosi, 2016; Paganini, 2015) and the

authors’ interviews with practitioners.

The maritime industry evidently is vulnerable to

a range of cyber risks. Damages from untrust-

worthy software or a loss of data integrity through

breaches into maritime instruments may result in cor-

rupt, skewed, or incorrect results. Attackers in the

Port of Antwerp case had access to control systems,

intercepted maritime communication, and altered sen-

sitive shipping information, e.g. characteristics of

Trust Management and Attribute-Based Access Control Framework for Protecting Maritime Cyber Infrastructure

535

goods, container speciﬁcs, approved carriers, and so

forth. Past maritime cybersecurity incidents have

caused the following damages:

• Automated systems malfunctioned or failed entirely;

• Expensive and valuable cargoes were stolen;

• Maritime stakeholders incurred ﬁnancial, reputa-

tional, and/or physical risks;

• Crew on vessels and operators in transit and at crit-

ical maritime nodes (e.g., ports, terminals, etc.) were

exposed to safety threats to; and

• Cyber operations of other systems connected to the

maritime entities were exposed to malicious cyber at-

tacks.

An attack of maritime cyber operations can come

about in a variety of ways – access to data can be

gained by social engineering attacks, as well as by

more sophisticated hacking techniques. An adversar-

ial incident of this nature could affect all of the organi-

zations connected to a port’s infrastructure, including

those who are not in a position to inﬂuence the port’s

cyber-security or have a role in responding to the in-

cident. (Brasington and Hadwin, 2016)

IBM (International Business Machines) reports

that cybersecurity is not only about trying to iden-

tify and to prevent systems on board ships from get-

ting hacked. The maritime industry, like many gov-

ernment agencies, as well as the aerospace and de-

fense industry, banking, and health insurance indus-

tries, and even the entertainment industry, recently

has become a prime target and has suffered substan-

tial losses. The vulnerabilities of maritime cyber op-

erations started to be under the scrutiny by public.

This situation indicated that the industry is not im-

mune from cyber threats and must deploy cybersecu-

rity techniques to protect itself. Luck, inaction, and

practitioners’ tight-lipped community prevent mali-

cious attacks. (Belmont, 2015) In this context, at

the most basic level, trustworthy access control tech-

niques need to be implemented to oversee the users

and the overall network cyber operations. (MTI,

2016)

2.2 Trust Management Policies for

Security Veriﬁcation

Trust management is a scalable form of access control

that relies heavily on delegation. According to Chen,

et al. (I. R. Chen and Bao, 2015), trust-related at-

tacks include: (1) self-promoting attacks, which pro-

mote own credibility through illegal means; (2) bad-

mouthing attacks: which reduce the trust value of

good nodes; (3) ballot-stufﬁng attacks, which boost

the reputation of malicious nodes; (4) opportunis-

tic service attacks, which raise their own reputation

through providing quality service in a random man-

ner; and (5) on-off attacks, which provide poor ser-

vices intermittently. Saied, et al. (Y. B. Saied and

Laurent, 2013) presented a method to evaluate the

trust value of nodes. The method considers all re-

ceived reports and past interactions and takes into ac-

count parameters of the network’s context (service)

and resource capabilities. Trust computation mod-

els and trust management systems have been im-

plemented successfully in commercial applications.

(Y. Zheng and Vasilakos, 2014)

Niu, et al (Niu et al., 2014) applied the trust man-

agement concept and developed techniques that sup-

port tools to solve problematic security veriﬁcation

instances. When an access control policy fails to sat-

isfy the desired security objectives, it becomes un-

trustworthy. The tools in that research provide infor-

mation about how and why the failure occurs. Such

information can assist policymakers in designing ap-

propriate policies. The approach to perform the anal-

ysis is based on model checking. To ensure the ef-

fectiveness of the approach, a collection of reduction

techniques was introduced. The paper proved the cor-

rectness of these reductions and empirically evaluated

their effectiveness. The class of analysis problem in-

stances is generally intractable, which indicates that

the reduction techniques are often able to reduce some

problem instances into a form that can be automati-

cally veriﬁed.

2.3 Summary

The information security literature reviewed above

discussed access control systems in general. In order

to manage the access control for the modern maritime

cyber operations, the method has to reﬂect the char-

acters and special needs in maritime cyber infrastruc-

ture. In Section 3, we present a new access control

framework that is adaptable and scalable for the com-

plex maritime cyber space.

3 ACCESS CONTROL

FRAMEWORK FOR

PROTECTING MARITIME

CYBER INFRASTRUCTURE

The setting of the present research includes a cen-

tral access control system and a sub access control

system for a well-deﬁned maritime system, for ex-

ample, a ship. In a ship, the captain can access any

maritime data, e.g., cargo information, ECDIS, GPS

coordinates, AIS, etc. The captain also has the au-

ICSOFT 2023 - 18th International Conference on Software Technologies

536

thority to communicate with external entities and send

any action orders, e.g. turning the ship, stopping the

ship, resetting cruise routes, etc. In contrast, a sailor

only has a limited access to maritime data and does

not have the authority to send any order and com-

municate with external entities. Other people in the

maritime supply chain are not allowed to access or

modify any information mentioned above. Without

access control, an inside or outside attacker can break

in the supply chain system through vulnerable points,

as easy as an email, or a USB key. The attacker can

access, compromise, steal, or damage sensitive infor-

mation and control all connected systems. The access

control system framework developed below intends to

address these threats to protect maritime company’s

cyber infrastructure.

3.1 Access Control Framework

We incorporate the concept of trust management pol-

icy into our access control framework of the maritime

cyber spaces. (Hughes and Bultan, 2008) Under the

trust-based framework, the method will evaluate the

trustworthiness of every node in the maritime com-

munication system. The method will rank all nodes

with respect to their reliability levels and select the

reliable nodes for the maritime users.

Fig. 1 shows the proposed access control frame-

work. As explained in details below, this framework

is adaptable and highly scalable for the maritime in-

dustry in light of: 1) the mechanism of traditional

access control frameworks and their shortcomings;

and 2) the combination with the existing networking

access control framework and identiﬁcation systems.

The goal of this framework is to achieve automatic

permissions assignment, security protection, and ﬁne-

grained, low-energy consumption of the access con-

trol in the maritime IT environment. To enable more

granular and scalable access control, we use different

authentication methods with respect to various trust

levels. In doing so, we can capitalize on the ﬂexi-

bilities of the custom trust evaluation mechanisms to

authenticate the nodes in the maritime ecosystem.

Figure 1: Trust Management and Attribute-based Access

Control Framework.

In Fig. 1, the access control framework consists

of two modules: Authentication and Service. The

Authentication module is mainly responsible for the

two-way authentication between the user and the Au-

thentication System. The features of the user authen-

tication system include identity veriﬁcation, veriﬁca-

tion information feedback, policy assignment, service

request, and so on. In the authentication process, the

authentication module ﬁrstly veriﬁes the identity in-

formation provided by the user. Once the preliminary

veriﬁcation is passed, the feedback information of the

user authentication will be sent to the user.

The feedback information includes two sub-

modules. The ﬁrst is the certiﬁcate of the authenti-

cation system, based on which users verify the legit-

imacy of the authentication system. The second is a

request list of user’s information based on which, the

authentication system can do a deeper level authenti-

cation. After the user has veriﬁed the feedback mes-

sage, the information requested in the feedback infor-

mation will be sent to the authentication system. The

authentication system completes the distribution of

user privilege according to the information and sends

the user’s request to the service module. If any in-

termediate certiﬁcation process fails, the veriﬁcation

is terminated, and the validation failure information

will be returned.

The service module also includes two sub-

modules: The selected service sub-module and the

service processing sub-module. The selected ser-

vice sub-module includes trust management compo-

nent and attacks-against component. The service pro-

cessing sub-module includes node joint work and

trust evaluation components which do trust evalua-

tion for each node according to the trust computing

method and corresponding trust management mecha-

nism. Then it selects the node with the highest reli-

ability for the user. The attack-against component is

responsible for maintaining the security of the service

module and resists to all kinds of trust-related attacks.

In brief, the framework integrates trust comput-

ing into the access control system. The framework

includes the network-wide access control, identiﬁca-

tion technologies, and trusted computing technolo-

gies. The trust computing technologies enable the ac-

cess control framework with the dynamic adaptive ca-

pacity and high scalability. The features of this frame-

work result in: 1) signiﬁcant enhancement in the mar-

itime access control; and 2) Optimized efﬁciencies

and beneﬁts to maritime cyber security.

Trust Management and Attribute-Based Access Control Framework for Protecting Maritime Cyber Infrastructure

537

3.2 Formal Veriﬁcation for Access

Control Framework

The following process provides logical actions to ver-

ify the proposed Access Control framework before

implementing it in live conditions:

• Deﬁne the Access Control Framework formal de-

scriptions;

• Develop a set of reference metrics to analytically

evaluate the capabilities of the Framework, and then

conduct a comprehensive analysis on the Framework

based on the metrics;

• Design a set of oracles to empirically test the run-

time functions of the Framework (i.e., whether they

can detect the faults embedded in the oracles); and,

• Plan a set of test case scenarios to empirically test

the runtime performance of the Framework. These

test cases are used not only for evaluating the perfor-

mance but also for exploring the factors that impact

the performance.

3.3 Implementation

There are user authentication and service processing

modules in the framework. Service processing mod-

ule includes service node selection sub-module and

service provider sub-module. The authors formalized

these modules as follows:

• User AU (Authentication Unit)

• SHU (Service Handle Unit)

• SNSU (Service Node Selection Unit)

• SPU (Service Provider Unit)

Formal veriﬁcation can be described as follows:

a) The user submits a request. The request accesses

by the AU for authentication: User AU: (UserID*,

Key*, TemporaryCertiﬁcate*, Privilege);

AU: Feedback authentication information, and give

the appropriate permissions User*: represents en-

crypted.

b) AU submits service request to SHU, AU SHU:

(AU-ID*, TemporaryCertiﬁcate*, ServiceRequest)

c) SHU sends service node selection request to SNSU,

SHU-SNSU: (TemporaryCertiﬁcate*, Request)

d) SNSU broadcasts the request to all nodes within

the maritime infrastructure, gets feedback from

nodes, and then selects the service node: SNSU*:

(SNSU-ID*, TemporaryCertiﬁcate*, Request), Node

SNSU: (NodeID*, TemporaryCertiﬁcate*, Trust-

Value)

e) SNSU sends selected node information to

SPU:SNSU SPU: (UserID*, NodeID*, Ser-

viceRequest) f) SPU uses the target node and

user information to provide appropriate services to

users and to evaluate the trust value of the node.

Then SPU passes the result to SNSU. SPU User, SPU

SNSU: (NodeID*, TrustValue)

The formal veriﬁcation of the service management

(trust management) module is described as follows:

• Th SHU formal Framework includes: (i) initiating a

start status, (ii) receiving a service request from AU,

and (iii) sending the selected node service request to

SNSU;

• The SNSU formal Framework includes: (i) initiat-

ing a start status, (ii) receiving a service node selec-

tion request from SHU, (iii) broadcasting the request

to all nodes within the scope, obtaining feedback from

node, and selecting the service node, (iv) sending the

selected node information to SPU, and (v) receiving

node trust value from SPU after the completion of ser-

vice;

• The SPU formal Framework includes: (i) initiating

a start status, (ii) receiving information of the selected

node from SNSU, (iii) using the received node infor-

mation and user information to provide appropriate

services to users, and then assessing the node trust

value, and (iv) sending node trust values involved in

the process to SNSU.

4 CONCLUDING REMARKS AND

FUTURE RESEARCH

The maritime cyber space has become a critical do-

main to operate global economic, ﬁnancial, social,

and military systems. However, a series of recent re-

ports regarding data breaches in the international mar-

itime industries expose the vulnerabilities in the mar-

itime information and communication systems. To

protect maritime cyber infrastructure, the present re-

search developed a novel trust management frame-

work to enhance the access control of maritime cyber

operations

Finally, the authors present a number of research

directions to account for the limitations of the present

research. First, our analysis focused on the cy-

bersecurity of a maritime environment with well-

deﬁned boundaries, namely, a boat. Further stud-

ies may consider a more complex setting, such as a

supplier-customer pair with multiple information sys-

tems. Secondly, the access control framework stud-

ied here does not detect attacks going through remote

nodes beyond the well-deﬁned maritime environment.

As such, more research may design and develop in-

trusion detection systems that span across a more dis-

tributed ecosystem, such as a supply chain. Lastly,

maritime supply chains may adopt a whole variety of

information systems. Distinct computing capacities

ICSOFT 2023 - 18th International Conference on Software Technologies

538

of different systems may result in performance vari-

ations of the access control method. Therefore, re-

searchers may need to establish systematic metrics to

evaluate the effectiveness of access control systems in

different maritime information systems.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the US Department

of Transportation (USDOT) Tier-1 University Trans-

portation Center (UTC) Transportation Cybersecu-

rity Center for Advanced Research and Education

(CYBER-CARE).

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