SEAGuard: A Blockchain-Based Security Framework for IoT Maritime Transportation Systems

Although the modernized Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS) have experienced meaningful advancements and benefits from the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, security, reliability and privacy issues have increased extensively. The federation of multiple maritime stakeholders in the flow of transportation management and schedule exacerbates these issues, with the MTS to encounter escalating attacks dealing with data manipulation and unauthorized access that pose risks of high severity in MTS. Therefore, the maritime IoT infrastructures require to transition from centralized to distributed networks with access control policies, strong identity authentication and private communication systems that cannot be manipulated by unauthorized stakeholders. Blockchain has recently emerged as a key technology for addressing data security and privacy issues. However, this integration can introduce substantial delays in maritime services. In this paper, we propose the SEAGuard framework, particularly designed and developed for addressing security and privacy issues specific to MTS. A virtualized testbed is built to evaluate the SEAGuard framework that is developed on-top of Hyperledger Fabric and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The results illustrate exceptional performance metrics with minimum latency and high throughput, less than 4 ms and more than 70 transactions per second, respectively.