Shipowners in Japan now have a formal way to certify gear that spots satellite navigation interference, after the country’s classification society wrote the option into its rulebook.
ClassNK lifted its Guidelines for Advanced Safety Measures to Edition 1.1 and published a class notation covering vessels fitted with equipment that identifies GNSS jamming or spoofing and raises an alarm on the watch. Owners take the mark up voluntarily, and it certifies detection and warning, never any claim of immunity.
That difference carries weight, because the two attacks work in opposite ways. Jamming smothers satellite signals outright. Spoofing hands a receiver false positions, leaving a bridge crew convinced a vessel is somewhere it is not. A sensor that only notices the trouble fixes neither problem.
A gateway the rules left open
Under the International Association of Classification Societies codes E26 and E27, ClassNK said its existing cyber resilience requirements never directly required protection against jamming or spoofing. The notation stands apart from those rules, closing a gap that shipowners and underwriters had been working around with no standard behind them.
Affected regions include the Black and Baltic Seas, the Gulf and much of East Asia. Every day of the third quarter, Windward logged an average of 5,131 jamming incidents.
The move also follows Britain’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which urged owners this month to plan for sailing without dependable satellite positioning. Flag states, charterers and insurers get a document from ClassNK they can point at, where before they had only an assurance.
