Simulating Cyber-Attacks on the Unmanned Sea-Surface Vessel’s Rudder Controller

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are digital and mechanical devices that use sensors and actuators to sense and change their state. The CPSs rely on the accuracy and precision of their constituents to achieve a desired state. All components of CPSs are susceptible to malfunction or failure. These systems are also vulnerable to deliberate attacks on both their cyber and physical components. Errors due to malfunctions or intended attacks on CPSs can cause the system to react in an undesirable or potentially dangerous way. As an example, consider a CPS as an unmanned sea-surface vehicle (USV). An adversary who spoofs the Global Positioning System (GPS) signal sent to the USV can fool the autopilot into trusting that the USV is somewhere other than where it is. As a result, the autopilot will detect that the USV is off course, risking a collision or running the USV aground. The adversary can attack the system at any of the components of the control system. This attack can be propagated through the control system, and it can change the value of the control signal in some random way. This effect might be modeled as overwriting the original control signal with a random value. Therefore, the focus of this chapter will be to simulate a disturbance in the control signals (we can assume it is caused by a cyber-attack) and how this affects the rudder behavior of the USV. An alternative solution using a controller aid will be proposed. This specific topic will be situated within the somewhat broader framework of digital transformation in the maritime industry, together with integrated navigation systems, whether on board the vessel or in a remote-control center on shore, as USVs are an inevitable part of this process.