Enhancing Unmanned Marine Vehicle Security: A Periodic Watermark-Based Detection of Replay Attacks

This paper explores a periodic watermark-based replay attack detection method for Unmanned Marine Vehicles modeled in the framework of the Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy system. The precise detection of replay attacks is crucial for ensuring the security of Unmanned Marine Vehicles; however, traditional timestamp-based or encoded measurement-dependent detection approaches often sacrifice system performance to achieve higher detection rates. To reduce the potential performance degradation, a periodic watermark-based detection scheme is developed, in which a compensation signal together with a periodic Gaussian watermark signal is integrated into the actuator. By compensation calculations conducted with all compensatory signals in each period, the position corresponding to a minimum value of the detection function can be derived. Then, the time that the attacks occurred can be ensured with the aid of the comparison between this position with the watermark signal in the same period. An application on a UMV is shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented scheme in detecting replay attacks while minimizing control costs.