Cyber-SHIP Lab

Maritime Cyber Security at the University of Plymouth Cyber-Ship Lab. Since confirmation of £3-million combined Research England and industry funding in January, the University of Plymouth Maritime Cyber Threat Research Group’s Cyber-SHIP Lab project has made significant progress.

The growing team (which is recruiting) is creating a world-first, unique platform for Maritime Cyber Security, on which they can reproduce any ship’s bridge—in-service or under development; effectively real ships bridge setups—not simulated.
The project has 20 partners on board, and counting, with 150 additional expressions of interest from shipbuilders, maritime IT and operational technology manufacturers, classification societies and insurers. Named partners include BMT UK; BT Ventures; Eaton; HENSOLDT UK, formerly Kelvin Hughes; Altran Group’s Information Risk Management; and Lloyd’s Register’s Nettitude.
Design and build is progressing, including the acquisition of the beginnings of what will become an extensive, perhaps the most comprehensive, collection of in-service or under-development ships’ bridge equipment, including voyage data recorders, radars, AISs, ECDISs, firewalls, switches, and UPSs. And various partners have committed to, or are in discussions about, providing their experts’ time or real-world data sets to populate the Cyber-SHIP Lab platform.
The project team is planning an online-for-now launch for 15 October (register your interest here) this year, including an all-too-realistic maritime cyber-attack scenario imagined by Cyber-SHIP Lab Principal Investigator Professor Kevin Jones, and “challenges and opportunities” responses from: The Society of Maritime Industries, techUK, and IMarEST. All followed by Q&A and input from a highly qualified invited audience.
The Research Group has also secured additional £160,000 MarRI-UK funding for its Maritime Cyber Risk Assessment framework (MaCRA) work, and progressed to the market validation stage of DCMS’s cyber-security academic start up accelerator funding competition, Cyber-ASAP.
Meanwhile, as part of its Cyber-MAR project involvement, the Research Group is progressing complementary cyber range work with specialised European container port authorities, empowering them to assess cyber risk and build threat resilience.
Stay in touch with all things Cyber-SHIP Lab by signing up to its newsletter here, and get involved by talking to Project and Knowledge Exchange Manager, Chloe Rowland.

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