AIS tampering is on the rise

Ship operators are increasingly manipulating AIS data to conceal their identity, location and destination, undermining the ability to track their activities. In a report published by maritime analytics company Windward, analysts identified that a growing number of vessels are manipulating the data to hide their intentions and prevent financial and security authorities from identifying them.

Included are vessels engaged in illegal fishing, oil tankers circumventing international sanctions and shipping companies seeking financial advantage from maintaining their opaqueness to commodity markets. This can include traders concealing cargoes that is kept in floating storage in order to affect global oil prices.

Whatever the reason for manipulating the data, it undermines the reliability of all AIS data, whether it is transmitted via coastal stations or satellite. The report highlights how AIS data has vulnerabilities when used for vessel-tracking purposes. The data limits the visibility of what ships are actually doing after leaving port and raises maritime security risks.

Increasing numbers of vessel operators are using the vulnerabilities to conceal criminal activity. Windward identified five methods of how companies are manipulating AIS data:

• identify fraud

• obscuring destinations

• switching off transmissions

• manipulating GPS

• spoofing AIS.

With around 90 per cent of the world’s trade and most commodities transported by sea, it is important to have accurate AIS data, Windward chief executive and co-founder Ami Daniel said. “Yet the oceans remain one of the last ‘wild west’ frontiers, as this report shows that the data available on what is happening at sea is increasingly unreliable and manipulated. Using this data as it appears is a dangerous and costly game of chance. With so much at stake, we are at the forefront of providing technology that reveals what is actually at sea.”

Ships are increasingly transmitting false or stolen identifying marks to hide their real identity. The report claims there has been a 30 per cent rise in the number of ships reporting false identities. It estimates up to 1 per cent of vessels with IMO identifiers are transmitting fake data, which poses a significant threat to maritime security.

Windward estimates that almost 60 per cent of ships are not reporting their next port of call, creating a considerable information gap for commodity trade-flow calculating. There could be commercial reasons for this, such as operators not knowing the final destination of cargo.

Another commonly used manipulation practice is vessel operators switching off their AIS transmission to conceal their activities. The report highlights that around a quarter of ships worldwide are turning off their AIS transmitters for at least 10 per cent of the time, taking into account active shutdowns and lack of satellite coverage. The shutdowns undermine the ability of stakeholders and security organisations to track vessels and monitor maritime areas.

Masters are also able to produce false vessel positions by tampering with the GPS feed to AIS equipment. Windward claims there has been a rise in this practice, with a 59 per cent increase in GPS manipulation from mid-2013 to mid-2014. AIS data can also be spoofed and inserted into a data stream, enabling people to create ‘ghost ships’ such as vessels that do not exist.

Spoofing is a growing trend because of the significant criminal and financial incentives to hide the real identities of ships, their locations and destinations. It is possible as there are no mechanisms to validate the data to ensure the information is accurate. With the widespread use of AIS data for vessel tracking, it is time to implement AIS cybersecurity countermeasures to halt this manipulation and ensure the integrity of AIS reports.

However, MarineTraffic business development director Argyris Stasinakis believes the incorrect positioning of ships is not as big a problem as Windward suggests, since most of the issues in the merchant fleet are accidental human error. This is considering that more than 120,000 vessels are tracked each day and there are in excess of 5 million monthly users of AIS data.

“We believe that less than 2 per cent of our vessel identifications are ambiguous and these are largely non-commercial vessels, being mostly Asia-based small craft,” Mr Stasinakis said. “Unlike many AIS tracking facilities, we report on all vessels fitted with a transponder, which can cause problems. In some countries such as the Netherlands, owners of small vessels frequently move the unique AIS transmission vessel identifier, or Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI), and/or the AIS transponders from one vessel to another.”

He thinks most of the incorrect reporting of AIS data is the result of human error. In some cases, the ship identifiers (MMSI number, IMO number, vessel’s name or call sign) on the AIS transponder have been wrongly configured.

“This has the potential to generate ambiguity as to the true identity of the vessel or its journey parameters,” Mr Stasinakis said. “In such cases, the open nature of the AIS protocol does not discriminate between conflicting positions of vessels that may happen to report the same ship identifier.”

He said errors can be minimised by cross-referencing reported AIS data with known vessel particulars. Algorithms are continuously comparing previous positions with reported positions and checking course and speed declarations to ensure the ship fits within a logical operating pattern. In this way, anomalies are highlighted and dealt with.

“We have built algorithms that learn the various combinations of port spellings and abbreviations and decipher what is sent by the ships,” Mr Stasinakis explained. “We are confident that we fully understand around 90 per cent of the information we receive.”

He adds that the ‘power of the crowd’ resolves most other issues. “With five million users looking at our facility it is not long before someone tells us about an anomaly in a ship’s position.”

He believes malevolent interference of AIS data is rarer than others estimate. In the past two years, MarineTraffic has seen just a handful of instances of hacked AIS data being used. Even so, he wants authorities to co-operate in implementing a system that protects the integrity of data that is transmitted.

“Currently, there is no mechanism to ensure the authenticity of AIS data,” he said. “I would like to work with the regulators so that we can be certain we know who is sending the data and that it is 100 per cent accurate, by using digital signatures or similar methods.”

MarineTraffic is combating the errors within AIS data by interpreting and correcting conflicting positions and by implementing intelligent systems that are able to learn from data errors as they are received. “No AIS facility can ever be 100 per cent accurate, but the steps we have taken will ensure that, of the 120,000 vessel positions we report every day, more than 99 per cent are accurate.”

New services and contracts

Softship has launched a new software package for container ship operators that has the ability to track real-time vessel positions against scheduled positions. The program also enables bunker management, capacity planning and port checklists.

“Our Voyces Pro software tool has been developed to meet real concerns and issues that are currently being voiced in the marketplace,” Softship executive director Thomas Wolff said.

“Bunker costs, for example, represent a significant slice of a carrier’s costs and our customers wanted a tool that would allow them to immediately see the impact on bunker consumption for a variety of schedule change scenarios.” The customised software package has been tested by two major container ship operators in Europe and the US.

Tekquest has developed a system for BG Group for tracking liquefied natural gas (LNG) vessel performance and scheduling. The vessel performance data monitoring system comprises two distinct applications. It includes an onboard Windows-based application, which captures and transmits the performance and scheduling data from each LNG carrier to the second application. This land-based online program is used for logging and presenting the data for analysis.

The onboard application was built with Microsoft’s Visual FoxPro 7 software to capture operational performance data and vessel-positioning information. There is also a scheduling module that tracks the ship’s schedule over several weeks. BG will have a server database to access the information and analytics via online portals.

PortVision has received a licence from the US Federal Communications Commission, which allows the company to transmit AIS safety messages directly to vessels that appear to be encroaching on fixed asset infrastructures, such as offshore pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico. PortVision has been working with the Coastal and Marine Operators group since 2012 to use AIS and related technology to improve safety around offshore pipelines. This work has seen a reduction in incidents causing infrastructure damage.

Singapore-based Brightree has introduced its ship tracking portal Brightseed that enables fleet managers to monitor their assets worldwide. It uses satellite services such as SkyWave IsatData Pro and Inmarsat FleetBroadband to track vessel position transmissions. Shipmanagers can use the portal to view vessel position, speed and direction, and route history. It also has a geofencing feature that alerts managers if ships operate outside a pre-determined boundary.

Satellites and equipment

Orbcomm has started commercial AIS services on the first six of its next generation of satellites (OG2). These Boeing-built satellites were launched in July on a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in Florida.

After in-orbit testing, the six satellites were properly spaced within their orbital planes and are now processing more than 20 per cent of the network traffic. The satellites enhance Orbcomm’s coverage by filling the gaps in the existing OG1 constellation. The company now collects more than 13 million AIS messages from in excess of 130,000 vessels per day.

This figure will be increased when more OG2 satellites are launched in 2015, Orbcomm chief executive Marc Eisenberg said. “While we have come a long way with the inaugural launch of OG2 service, we are now focused on the second phase of the OG2 constellation and launching the last 11 satellites as part of our second mission. This will enable us to provide new OG2 features and services round the clock and continue to bring AIS ship visibility down from hours to minutes.”

ExactEarth has won a C$19.2 (US$17.2) million contract from the Government of Canada to provide advanced satellite AIS data services. The deal covers a period of 18 months and supersedes the existing AIS data services contract that had been in place since 2012 with the Canadian Space Agency and Department of National Defence.

The data will be used for wide-area maritime surveillance and security, customs and border protection, Arctic vessel traffic monitoring, fisheries and environment monitoring, as well as assisting with search and rescue services. “Since the Government of Canada first adopted the exactAIS service in 2010, their usage has grown exponentially, both in terms of number of users and number of applications,” exactEarth president Peter Mabson said.

Global Telesat Communications has started selling the smallest self-contained Iridium satellite tracker, GSatMicro, in the UK. The device can be used for tracking vessels and maritime personnel for security and safety and fleet management applications. GSatMicro is 45mm x 45mm x 29mm and can transmit a position from anywhere in the world every 30 seconds. A location can be viewed on the associate GTCTrack online mapping portal that can be accessed from any Apple and Android operated mobile device. MEC