Risk evaluation of an ARP poisoning attack on clock synchronization for industrial applications

Abstract

Nowadays, mixed wireless and wired networks are used everywhere in everyday life, including in industry where they often support time-critical applications. Industrial applications with high precision requirements are subject to real-time constraints, and thus one of the main assets, regardless of application area, is clock synchronization. Considering such networks, synchronization is the first thing to secure against a possible malicious adversary. In this paper, we consider ARP poisoning as a possible technique to disrupt clock synchronization and evaluate the effects of such an attack on the IEEE 1588 standard. We describe possible ways of performing ARP poisoning to disrupt synchronization and survey several mitigation techniques and their applicability within the industrial application area.