AIS Cybersecurity: Challenges, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigation Strategies

Maritime operations rely on the Automatic Identification System (AIS), an open broadcast protocol whose unauthenticated, self-reported Messages are easily abused. This survey takes an AIS-first, security-focused view, grounded in a comprehensive review of prior AIS-security research. We (i) explain how AIS works and use that to expose fundamental weaknesses; (ii) synthesize from the literature the main threats and their technical and operational impacts; (iii) categorize, from the surveyed works and operational practice, mitigations by the layers they target and, for each mitigation, indicate whether it primarily prevents, detects, responds, or supports recovery; and (iv) provide practical recommendations. Bringing together cybersecurity, maritime operations, and data-science perspectives, we consolidate recommendations for securing AIS-based systems and assess their current use in practice, thus highlighting the gaps that standards and implementations still need to address.