The Great Lakes Research Center (GLRC) is seeking students interested in participating in the inaugural CyberBoat Challenge event, hosted by the GLRC, May 23-25, 2022. If you are interested, please complete and return the attached participant application no later than Friday, May 6, 2022.
Ubiquitous, reliable, safe, and cost-effective transportation is key to our way of life and a prime ingredient of the American lifestyle. The State of Michigan believes that the cybersecurity of the transportation domain – whether ships, cars, trucks, planes or heavy equipment – is at the core of an important new industry and discipline. Michigan is backing research, information exchange, fostering communities of interest, and engaging the imagination of today’s students and tomorrow’s cyber workforce in specifically highlighting vehicular cybersecurity and Michigan’s central role in the future of connected and autonomous vehicles.
The CyberBoat Challenge teaches techniques and understanding of this domain, and also helps facilitate collaboration among industry, academia, the research community, and government. This event will be strongly pro-industry and seek to provide understanding, tools, and highly useful resources to help OEMs and suppliers master the cybersecurity domain and create progressively superior products.
Several classes will be presented over a two-day period, including hardware reverse engineering, software reverse engineering, systems reverse engineering, component analysis, fundamentals of CAN (Controller Area Network), fundamentals of the communications protocols used by these systems, and some shorter demos and classes. We will also spend time talking about the NDA and its legal, ethical, and moral responsibilities. Following the two days of classes, a two-day guided assessment exercise will take place in which the teams will get to know the system to which they are assigned.
The event is held with selected university students, government engineers, industry engineers, hackers, and educators who will form teams, learn about cybersecurity principles for the maritime domain in a practicum-based setting, and then apply their skills to a small platform. The application phase serves as a “down-select” function for a large asset owner to invite some or all qualifying students to assess a large vessel at port after the training event’s close.
The event embraces twin, co-equal goals: to help excite and train the next generation workforce within the transportation cyber domain by providing engaging, hands-on training and close contact with industry professionals; and to foster a community of interest regarding maritime cybersecurity practices amongst the professionals.
Please see the attached vision statement for more details on the event format and content. This event is modeled off of the highly successful CyberAuto and CyberTruck challenges. Please complete and return the attached participant application no later than Friday, May 6, 2022, if you are interested in participating in this year’s CyberBoat Challenge!
Download the CyberBoat Challenge student application below:
Download the CyberBoat Vision below: