This paper establishes a fundamental theory of secure clock synchronization. Accurate clock synchronization is the backbone of systems managing power distribution, financial transactions, telecommunication operations, database services, etc. Some clock synchronization (time transfer) systems, such as the global navigation satellite systems, are based on one-way communication from a master to a slave clock. Others, such as the network transport protocol, and the IEEE 1588 precision time protocol (PTP), involve two-way communication between the master and slave. This paper shows that all one-way time transfer protocols are vulnerable to replay attacks that can potentially compromise timing information. A set of conditions for secure two-way clock synchronization is proposed and proved to be necessary and sufficient. It is shown that IEEE 1588 PTP, although a two-way synchronization protocol, is not compliant with these conditions, and is therefore insecure. Requirements for secure IEEE 1588 PTP are proposed, and a second example protocol is offered to illustrate the range of compliant systems.
@cite_5 propose measuring the propagation delays during initialization of clock synchronization and monitoring the propagation delays during the normal operation of the time synchronization protocol. However, @cite_5 does not prove that such a defense would be sufficient to prevent the delay attacks.
@cite_5
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Recently, a few efficient timing synchronization protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been proposed with the goal of maximizing the accuracy and minimizing the power utilization. This paper proposes novel clock skew estimators assuming different delay environments to achieve energy-efficient network-wide synchronization for WSNs. The proposed clock skew correction mechanism significantly increases the re-synchronization period, which is a critical factor in reducing the overall power consumption. The proposed synchronization scheme can be applied to the conventional protocols without additional overheads. Moreover, this paper derives the Cramer-Rao lower bounds and the maximum likelihood estimators under different delay models and assumptions. These analytical metrics serves as good benchmarks for the thus far reported experimental results