Modern sea as well as domestic ports are more and more controlled by IT-systems. Each of the players involved in port operations (like terminal operator, shipping companies, forwarder, port authorities, or customs) maintains its own IT-infrastructure that is loosely connected to the other players. As the frictionless operation of such harbors is of eminent importance for national economy, so is the security and resilience of the It-infastructure controlling these habors. The cost for neglecting IT-security have appeared only recently when a virus attack on a large shipping company caused damages of several hundred million Euros.
The project SecProPort, funded with about 2.8 Mill.€ by the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, aims at the development and the prototypical realisation of a general and embracing IT-security architecture for transport and port communication systems used in habours. These systems combine various heterogeneous actors like, for instance, port authorities, logistic companies, shipowners, terminal owners. The architekture will support the various and heterogeneous security requirements of the workflows running in this environment. This comprises the security of workflows against sabotage, (e.g. the intrusion of attackers into individual process steps ) as well as the espionage of confidential data by observing the visible behavior of the system. This aspect of confidentiality relates to responsibilities of public administrations as well as sensitive assets of commercial actors.
The consortium is a balanced mix of actors operating in the harbor environment – dbh Logistics IT AG (operator and SW-developer of a port community system), Hapag-Lloyd AG (shipping company), BLG LOGISTICS GROUP AG & Co. KG logistic company) and Duisburger Hafen AG (harbor authority) – an evaluation body in the area of IT-security: datenschutz cert GmbH, as well as several reseach institutes DFKI, Institut für Seeverkehrswirtschaft und Logistik (ISL) and University of Bremen. The project started 2018/11/1 running for 3 years.
Partners
- dbh Logistics IT AG
- Institut für Seeverkehrswirtschaft und Logistik (ISL)
- datenschutz cert GmbH
- Universität Bremen
- Hapag-Lloyd AG
- BLG LOGISTICS GROUP AG & Co. KG
- Duisburger Hafen AG
