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When Fail-Secure Is Not Fail-Safe: Parser Safety in S-100 Maritime Navigation.

Created on 27 Oct 2026

Authors

Hoyeon Cho, Seojeong Lee, Changui Lee

Published in

Sensors (Basel, Switzerland). Volume 26. Issue 20. Oct 12, 2026. Epub Oct 12, 2026.

Abstract

Safety-critical maritime navigation depends on machine-readable data products. Their digital signatures establish provenance and integrity but do not guarantee that authenticated content can be parsed safely: even passive data containing no executable code can drive allocation through file-supplied metadata. Using OpenS100, an open S-100 reference implementation, this paper asks whether passive S-102 products can compromise parser memory safety and whether operating system protection alone preserves availability. This paper analyzed the S-102 bathymetric surface specification, built a structurally valid proof-of-concept file with inconsistent grid metadata, and ran it under strong and weak operating system protection across repeated trials. The file triggered an integer overflow and heap buffer overflow without an executable payload. Under strong memory protection, no tested exploit achieved code execution; process termination dominated and the base trigger produced deterministic denial of service, a Fail-Secure outcome that still removed the navigation display. Under weak protection, existing-function reuse achieved Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE) in 14 of 200 launches (7.0%). Neither preserved safe-navigation continuity in the tested application. A four-layer application-level validation sequence applied before allocation prevented both, with no workload-dominant overhead in three desktop microbenchmarks. Passive data are therefore security-relevant parser inputs; preserving both security and availability requires validation before corruption occurs.

PMID:
42944310
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 27 Oct 2026.

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