Abstract

Maritime Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) have surpassed key milestones in real-time navigation data exchange during modern maritime operations, including ship-to-ship communication, autonomous navigation and smart port integration. These applications are, however, posed with a variety of security risks due to the network's centralized and dynamic attributes, which may compromise data confidentiality, integrity, accessibility, and navigational safety. This paper studies the comprehensive literature on security weaknesses and gaps in maritime MANETs, analyzing the unique security threats imposed by the maritime environment such as disconnection, lack of infrastructure, and large coverage areas. Extreme gaps in security protocols crafted by existing literature was uncovered as a result of scarce void patching on established security measures. Spoofing, denial of service, and man-in-the-middle exploits proved most prevalent using case study analysis, risk assessment techniques, and simulation-based evaluation. Key mitigative recommendations which have been proofed under maritime contexts are emergency, authentication, and access control focused tailored encryption. There is therefore an urgent need to secure maritime systems with real time communication and navigation features alongside tested blueprints which will lead the charge in developing robust architectures for maritime networks.