arXiv subjects

Animesh Chhotaray

Publications and source records attributed to Animesh Chhotaray.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Batten the Hatches: Cybersecurity with Military Mariners

Cyberwarfare has become a key component of contemporary geopolitical conflict. However, there has been extremely limited systematic investigation into how cybersecurity is handled by military organizations and personnel. The military context is unique compared to other operational ones, with immense resource availability (U.S. military spending approached 1 trillion dollars in 2024), a rigid chain of command, and extraordinary consequences for its actions. Thus, military cybersecurity is a distinct yet understudied topic. In this paper, we take an early step at understanding military cybersecurity by investigating how service members understand, recognize, and respond to cyber risk. We focus on maritime services and carefully consider organizational barriers to design an unclassified study and conduct semi-structured interviews with 20 military mariners from U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels. Through our investigation, we identify unique consequences of compromising military systems, including weapon takeover and purposeful geopolitical escalation. We find that cybersecurity is organizationally abstract on ships, so mariners build cyber risk models from informal experience rather than formal instruction. They nonetheless make cybersecurity actionable by recognizing operational impacts and responding with a safety-oriented incident-response model that creates resilience but may delay cyber attribution and containment. These findings inform actionable recommendations to help military operators frame cyber threats, merge longstanding nautical doctrine with modern systems, and apply military insights to the civilian sector, all to secure the broader maritime environment.

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arXiv2026

Grid Trouble in Paradise: Uncovering Vulnerable Distributed Energy Resources and Their Grid-Level Risks

Grid-connected solar distributed energy resources (DERs), such as solar inverters and monitoring platforms, have been deployed at unprecedented scale over the past few years, with global solar capacity more than doubling since 2022. To support monitoring and control, many of these systems are Internet-connected and configured by installers or end users, yet the real-world scale of their Internet exposure and the implications for power grid operation remain poorly understood. In this paper, we present an Internet-scale evaluation of exposed and vulnerable solar DER infrastructure, and assess the risk that compromised DERs can pose to energy grids. We develop a method for accurately identifying solar DERs from Internet scanning data, and discover a diverse population of over 66,000 Internet-exposed solar DERs. We detect that at least 10,000 of these DERs may have known CVEs, such as unauthenticated monitoring and control endpoints. To assess the risk that these vulnerable DERs pose to a power grid, we use an electric grid network for Oahu, Hawaii, established and used by the power system research community, and conduct a power system analysis. Our evaluation shows that by compromising exposed DERs, attackers can cause voltage and line flow violations across multiple locations in the Oahu network, resulting in a range of consequences from degraded power quality to damaged power system components to power outages. Ultimately, our work brings to light the emerging threat of grid-connected DERs, and provides directions for improving energy security.

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arXiv2025

A Sea of Cyber Threats: Maritime Cybersecurity from the Perspective of Mariners

Maritime systems, including ships and ports, are critical components of global infrastructure, essential for transporting over 80% of the world's goods and supporting internet connectivity. However, these systems face growing cybersecurity threats, as shown by recent attacks disrupting Maersk, one of the world's largest shipping companies, causing widespread impacts on international trade. The unique challenges of the maritime environment--such as diverse operational conditions, extensive physical access points, fragmented regulatory frameworks, and its deeply interconnected structure--require maritime-specific cybersecurity research. Despite the sector's importance, maritime cybersecurity remains underexplored, leaving significant gaps in understanding its challenges and risks. To address these gaps, we investigate how maritime system operators perceive and navigate cybersecurity challenges within this complex landscape. We conducted a user study comprising surveys and semi-structured interviews with 21 officer-level mariners. Participants reported direct experiences with shipboard cyber-attacks, including GPS spoofing and logistics-disrupting ransomware, demonstrating the real-world impact of these threats. Our findings reveal systemic and human-centric issues, such as training poorly aligned with maritime needs, insufficient detection and response tools, and serious gaps in mariners' cybersecurity understanding. Our contributions include a categorization of threats identified by mariners and recommendations for improving maritime security, including better training, response protocols, and regulation. These insights aim to guide future research and policy to strengthen the resilience of maritime systems.

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arXiv2025

One Video to Steal Them All: 3D-Printing IP Theft through Optical Side-Channels

The 3D printing industry is rapidly growing and increasingly adopted across various sectors including manufacturing, healthcare, and defense. However, the operational setup often involves hazardous environments, necessitating remote monitoring through cameras and other sensors, which opens the door to cyber-based attacks. In this paper, we show that an adversary with access to video recordings of the 3D printing process can reverse engineer the underlying 3D print instructions. Our model tracks the printer nozzle movements during the printing process and maps the corresponding trajectory into G-code instructions. Further, it identifies the correct parameters such as feed rate and extrusion rate, enabling successful intellectual property theft. To validate this, we design an equivalence checker that quantitatively compares two sets of 3D print instructions, evaluating their similarity in producing objects alike in shape, external appearance, and internal structure. Unlike simple distance-based metrics such as normalized mean square error, our equivalence checker is both rotationally and translationally invariant, accounting for shifts in the base position of the reverse engineered instructions caused by different camera positions. Our model achieves an average accuracy of 90.87 percent and generates 30.20 percent fewer instructions compared to existing methods, which often produce faulty or inaccurate prints. Finally, we demonstrate a fully functional counterfeit object generated by reverse engineering 3D print instructions from video.

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