Developments and research directions in maritime cybersecurity: A systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis

TLDR

The maritime industry’s shift toward Industry 4.0 has increased interconnectivity, creating new cyber‑attack risks that prior reviews have not systematically examined through bibliometric analysis. This review aims to map the current state of academic research on maritime cybersecurity. Using PRISMA‑guided systematic search of Scopus with tailored keywords, we performed a bibliometric analysis to identify research topics, methods, challenges, and future directions. Norway, the UK, France, and the USA dominate authorship, while research focuses mainly on risk‑assessment techniques and monitoring/intrusion‑detection tools, and we identified 53 challenges and 73 suggested future topics.

Abstract

Ships and maritime infrastructure are becoming increasingly interconnected as the maritime industry is undergoing the industry 4.0 revolution. This development is associated with novel risk types such as the increased potential for successful cyberattacks. Several review studies have investigated the regulatory framework in connection to maritime cybersecurity, the vulnerabilities in maritime systems, potential cyberattack scenarios, and risk assessment techniques. None of them though, has implemented a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of the available academic research studies in the discipline of maritime cybersecurity. The aim of this review, therefore, is to offer a succinct description of the progress in academic research on the arising topic of maritime cybersecurity. To that end, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of maritime cybersecurity-related studies based on several metrics and analysis tools, identified the topics of academic research in this field, the employed methodologies and identified the main research challenges and directions in connection to maritime cybersecurity. To achieve the objectives, we employed principles from Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Metanalysis (PRISMA) for systematic literature review and tailored keywords during a search in Scopus. The results demonstrated that Norway, the United Kingdom, France and the USA are the leading countries in maritime cybersecurity based on the weighted number of authors. The results also demonstrated that the main research focus in the area was on the development or application of cybersecurity risk assessment techniques and the design of monitoring and intrusion detection tools for cyberattacks in maritime systems. Based on the analysed literature, 53 challenges in various studies were identified and 73 topics for future research were suggested.