ASSAILLANT

Cyber attacks have become an extremely worrying problem that affects all structures and layers of the socio-economic world as soon as these players use information exchanges: companies, administrations but also health services and players in education and research are concerned. The maritime world is no exception, and the new pirates are as much cyber as real. With its port infrastructure and economic activities along the Channel coastline, the Normandy region has been hard hit.

The aim of the ASSAILLANT project is to study cyber threats to information systems (IS) on ships and logistics systems used in port handling. Using known macroscopic models of attacker behaviour, attack graphs and kill chains, the project aims to develop a detailed analysis of the propagation of threats through the vulnerabilities of these systems.

In particular, the temporal and probabilistic aspects of attacks will be studied in a distributed context. Typically, the questions we wish to answer are as follows :

• What is the overall vulnerability of an embedded IS?
• How can information exchanges be organised to limit the attacker’s impact?
• How much time does an attacker need to corrupt critical system components?
• Conversely, how much time does the defender have to reinforce the security of the installation?

We plan to study these questions from the angle of cyber-physical systems organised as distributed agent networks, and to do so we propose to form a joint research team made up of specialists in cyber-security, computer science, automatic control and mathematics. The project involves the Université Le Havre Normandie and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Maritime, which will make its virtual ship bridge platform available to test and validate the project’s advances.

ENSM contact point :

Pedro MERINO-LASO – Researcher

pedro.merino-laso@supmaritime.fr

ENSM participant in the project :

Pedro MERINO-LASO – Research associate

pedro.merino-laso@supmaritime.fr