Communication and Cybersecurity Testbed for Autonomous Passenger Ship

Many industrial sectors are undergoing a digital transformation, including maritime. New technological advancements and modes of operations are being introduced to maritime infrastructure, which includes ships, ports, and other facilities. Digital transformation in maritime has among its goals reducing human involvement and improving remote connectivity. The achievement of these goals hinges on several components, including communication technologies and cybersecurity. Consequently, maritime-related communication and cybersecurity solutions are in high demand. This paper targets the development of a maritime-themed testbed utilized to evaluate and analyze several maritime use cases, including autonomous passenger ships (APS) with a prime focus on the communication and cybersecurity aspects. We have proposed abstraction of processes guiding the utilization of the testbed capabilities. Also, we proposed an approach for replicating the target system of analysis which facilitates the analysis and evaluation activities. The proposed testbed and its processes have been evaluated by discussing some of the projects that utilized it, including evaluating communication and cybersecurity architectures for an APS use case. Additionally, after comparison with the state-of-the-art in cybersecurity testbeds, the testbed was found to be supporting the majority of the concepts and properties observed in the literature while the missing elements were highlighted and designated as suggestions for future work. Moreover, we provide a discussion of the challenges in cybersecurity evaluation in maritime in general and autonomous ships in particular.