Hacking on the High Seas: How Automated Reverse-Engineering Can Assist Vulnerability Discovery of a Proprietary Communication Protocol

The digitalisation of the world is a global trend affecting many industries, including the maritime transport sector. Electronic navigational equipment aboard modern ships has undoubtedly decreased naval accidents, but these devices may suffer from cybersecurity vulnerabilities. One such vector, is its reliance on a great number of protocols for communication. Currently there is limited awareness of the security strengths and weaknesses of maritime protocols, because of the manual-reverse-engineering cost due to their proprietary nature. However, we substantiate that advances in automated protocol reverse-engineering are effectively lowering this cost. Our paper analyses a proprietary protocol, widely used in naval equipment. This protocol was reverse engineered through manual and automated techniques, revealing the advantages and drawbacks of both. Our results show that statistical automated protocol reverse-engineering techniques were sufficient to discover the relevant protocol fields. We introduce the disclosed communication structure and its vulnerabilities, which are both verified by the success of rudimentary attacks. The disclosed protocol, by manual and automated techniques, could also aid intrusion detection (and prevention) system development for maritime operational technology systems, to help vendors avoid the identified vulnerabilities during system design and implementation.