Revised Summary

Professor Jeff Greer from UNC Wilmington is developing a virtual ship environment optimized for maritime cybersecurity education to address two critical challenges: undergraduate students' lack of maritime domain knowledge and severely limited access to physical ships due to port security and insurance restrictions.

Key Takeaways:

• The joint study with Unitest Marine Simulators aims to adapt existing maritime training technology for cybersecurity education by creating a comprehensive virtual learning environment [1:11]
• Three primary use cases guide the development: teaching ship domain knowledge to non-mariner cybersecurity students, implementing security by design principles, and training response to cyber attack scenarios [3:10]
• The Unitest X92 simulator contains detailed representations of 20 ship subsystems but lacks full ship integration, network diagrams, and cyber-attack simulation capabilities [7:28]
• Current functional gaps include missing network visualization, limited subsystem interconnectivity, and absence of cybersecurity-related fault scenarios [10:19]
• Phase two will integrate the simulator with bridge simulators, physical testbeds, and network emulation tools, with completion anticipated in spring 2026 [12:03]

Educational Approach:

The transdisciplinary framework combines maritime domain expertise with cybersecurity education through model-based systems engineering. Professor Greer teaches five critical thinking skills essential for maritime cybersecurity: understanding what systems are, why they're important, how they work, how they can fail, and how failures can be prevented. This approach addresses the complex, interconnected nature of ship systems where cybersecurity failures can have significant physical consequences.