Maritime processes involve actors and systems that continuously change their underlying environment, location and threat exposure. Thus, risk mitigation requires a dynamic risk assessment process, coupled with an adaptive, event driven security enforcement mechanism, to efficiently deal with dynamically evolving risks in a cost efficient manner. In this paper, we propose an adaptive security framework that covers both situational risk assessment and situational driven security policy deployment. We extend MITIGATE, a maritime-specific risk assessment methodology, to capture situations in the risk assessment process and thus produce fine-grained and situation-specific, dynamic risk estimations. Then, we integrate DynSMAUG, a situation-driven security management system, to enforce adaptive security policies that dynamically implement security controls specific to each situation. To validate the proposed framework, we test it based on maritime cargo transfer service. We utilize various maritime specific and generic systems employed during cargo transfer, to produce dynamic risks for various situations. Our results show that the proposed framework can effectively assess dynamic risks per situation and automate the enforcement of adaptive security controls per situation. This is an important improvement in contrast to static and situation-agnostic risk assessment frameworks, where security controls always default to worst-case risks, with a consequent impact on the cost and the applicability of proper security controls.

Maritime supply chains involve various infrastructures and human actors, belonging to different organizations with diverse business and operational goals. Existing cybersecurity risk assessment methods are mainly focused on the identification of malicious actors and the relevant cyber threats. Nevertheless, threats can also arise from operators’ tasks and errors, while interacting with information systems. In this paper, we analyze how human task modeling techniques support the identification of cyber threats on supply chain operators’ tasks. In particular, we focus on external attackers threatening supply chain operators’ tasks, on internal supply chain operators making errors during planned tasks, as well as on insiders deviating from planned tasks. We present the application of the proposed technique on the MITIGATE risk assessment methodology. In addition, we describe an illustrative example of a maritime transport supply chain service process involving four types of users deriving from three types of organizations, who implement tasks ranging from the cargo manifest declaration to the maritime requested services preparation.

The goal of this paper is to propose a framework in order to automate the environmental vulnerability assessment of communication protocols and networked services in operational environments. Initially, a network security ontology is defined, to model the environmental characteristics related with the current security status of available communication protocols channels within an examined infrastructure. The functionality of this infrastructure is presented by an ontology. All active communication services are initially identified and enumerated using a combination of different information gathering tools. Then by combining passive scanning and active security analysis tools each active communication service is assessed to output an environmental security score. This score may be utilized in vulnerability scoring systems such as CVSS, to properly adjust relevant scores and to identify implementation or configuration weaknesses in real environments. By using a test environment that involves various networks and communication protocols, we validate the proposed framework and we provide concrete examples for popular communication protocols.