SIGMAR: Ensuring Integrity and Authenticity of Maritime Systems using Digital Signatures

Distributed maritime bridge systems are customary standard equipment on today’s commercial shipping and cruising vessels. The exchange of nautical data, e.g., geographical positions, is usually implemented using multicast network communication without security measures, which poses serious risks to the authenticity and integrity of transmitted data. In this paper, we introduce digital SIGnatures for MARitime systems (SIGMAR), a low-cost solution to seamlessly retrofit authentication of nautical data based on asymmetric cryptography. Extending the existing IEC 61162-450 protocol makes it is possible to build a backward-compatible authentication mechanism that prevents common cyber attacks. The development was successfully accompanied by permanent investigations in a bridge simulation environment, including a maritime cyber attack generator. We demonstrate SIGMAR’s feasibility by introducing a proof-of-concept implementation on low-cost and low-resource hardware and present a performance analysis of our approach.