As the number of installed Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs) increases, the concerns related to possible cyber-attacks to these systems rise accordingly. The most of BESS owners knows their systems may be vulnerable, but they often consider only denial of service attacks in their risk assessment. Unfortunately, other, subtler and more dangerous attacks exist. In this paper we show that a stealth attack to BESSs can be performed by applying a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) approach. The aim of the attack is to stealthily manage the physical system by hiding the actual behavior of the system to its supervisory controller. In this case the attacker would be able to: (i) degrade the BESS by reducing its expected lifetime, (ii) produce economic losses for the prosumer, and (iii) affect the security and stability of the grid. The feasibility of the attack is demonstrated by providing an example of a stealth MitM attack on a real BESS coupled with a photovoltaic power plant. The proposed case study demonstrates that such attack can be performed without being discovered by end-users and shows that its effects can be severe. Finally, possible strategies to avoid or detect such kind of attack are discussed.

In the maritime sector, the integration of radar systems, Automatic Identification System (AIS) and Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) through digital technologies enables several benefits to maritime operations, but also make ships prone to cyberattacks. In this context, this work investigates the feasibility of an attacker using a radar system or AIS as open door to remotely send commands to a cyber threat hosted on a ship, even if the ship’s systems are air gapped—i.e., are not connected to other networks. The received commands are intended to trigger a cyber threat located in the ship. Although the literature covers several analyzes on cyber risks and vulnerabilities in naval systems, it lacks exploiting mechanisms capable of acknowledging attack commands received through radar and AIS. To this end, this work proposes a triggering mechanism that uses a template matching technique to detect specific patterns transmitted by the attacker to the ship’s radar or AIS. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique as a tool to acknowledge the received attack commands and activate a malicious code previously installed on the ship. In the case of attacks on a radar system, the accuracy achieved by the proposed method is 0.90. In the case of attacks on an AIS/ECDIS setup it presents an accuracy of 0.93. In both cases the proposed mechanism maintains the due safety against accidental attack activations.

Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) is a strategic field of study that seeks to provide a coastal country with an effective monitoring of its maritime resources and its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). In this scope, a Maritime Monitoring System (MMS) aims to leverage active surveillance of military and non-military activities at sea using sensing devices such as radars, optronics, automatic Identification Systems (AISs), and IoT, among others. However, deploying a nation-scale MMS imposes great challenges regarding the scalability and cybersecurity of this heterogeneous system. Aiming to address these challenges, this work explores the use of blockchain to leverage MMS cybersecurity and to ensure the integrity, authenticity, and availability of relevant navigation data. We propose a prototype built on a permissioned blockchain solution using HyperLedger Fabric—a robust, modular, and efficient open-source blockchain platform. We evaluate this solution’s performance through a practical experiment where the prototype receives sensing data from a Software-Defined-Radio (SDR)-based low-cost AIS receiver built with a Raspberry Pi. In order to reduce scalability attrition, we developed a dockerized blockchain client easily deployed on a large scale. Furthermore, we determined, through extensive experimentation, the client optimal hardware configuration, also aiming to reduce implementation and maintenance costs. The performance results provide a quantitative analysis of the blockchain technology overhead and its impact in terms of Quality of Service (QoS), demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of our solution in the scope of an MMS using AIS data.

Industrial control systems (ICS) include networked control systems (NCS), which use Real-Time Ethernet (RTE) protocols since many years, well before the Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) initiative debut. Today, Ethernet based control systems are used all across Industry 4.0, including in critical applications, allowing for straight integration with IT layers. Even if it is known that current RTE protocols do not have strong authentication or ciphering options, it is still very challenging to perform undetected cyber-attacks to these protocols while the NSC is in operation, in particular because such attacks must comply with very strict and small temporal constraints. In this paper, a model based attack is proposed for service degradation of NCS. The attack is carried out in real-time and it can remain undetected for the entire plant life. The attack can be applied to any RTE protocols and, without loss of generality, a detailed analysis of stealth techniques is provided for a specific real use case based on PROFINET. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed attack and its high effectiveness. The paper also points out some possible future investigation directions in order to mitigate the attack.