Abstract
Time synchronization is quickly becoming a fundamental prerequisite for a smart society. With the development of the fifth-generation (5G) network, time-sensitive networking (TSN), and the rise of high-precision networks, its accurate and reliable features have attracted an increasing amount of attention. As the most promising protocol with sub-microsecond accuracy, precision time protocol (PTP) has been widely used for network synchronization, and its proper operation and security are critical to the industries that build the infrastructure for a smart society. In order to provide synchronization security as a service, this paper presents a scheme based on software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) principles for synchronization security. Security management is built as a virtual network function (VNF), and a mitigation mechanism is proposed to detect delay attacks and generate countermeasures. Finally, we investigate the impact of random delay attacks, constant delay attacks, and linear delay attacks and verify the performance of the proposed mitigation mechanism through experiments. The results show that the scheme is capable of detecting PTP delay attacks and mitigating their impact on time synchronization.
Highlights
Time synchronization is the smart and digital society’s foundation, as the infrastructure of the future society is full of distributed systems and connected by ubiquitous networks
This paper presents how synchronization security could benefit from building the detection and mitigation of synchronization attacks as virtual network functions and jointing the network state information and the time synchronization data for delay attack mitigation
After being processed by the proposed solution, the imposed precision time protocol (PTP) delay attacks will be detected by the virtual security management functions (VSMFs), and the path between the master and slave clocks will be changed to an alternate secure one
Summary
Time synchronization is the smart and digital society’s foundation, as the infrastructure of the future society is full of distributed systems and connected by ubiquitous networks. H. Li et al.: Security Management Architecture for Time Synchronization Towards High Precision Networks timing requirements is becoming more prominent, as malicious attacks on time synchronization services can jeopardize the reliability of devices and services [9]. With the popularity of NFV, the software-defined NEs (e.g., Open vSwitch, vRouters, etc.) running on commercial servers make it more critical to prevent delay attacks for the synchronization security of high precision networks. The main contributions are threefold as follows: 1) Towards the increasingly widespread and diverse security requirements of time synchronization, an SDN/NFV enhanced architecture is proposed to provide synchronization security as a service by building synchronization securities as virtual network functions (VNFs).
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