Emerging solutions for time protocol security

Security has historically not been a top consideration for the developers of time synchronization protocols. However, in recent years rising awareness of the overall importance of security in general along with increasing examples of targeted vulnerability analysis and incidents exploiting the underlying weaknesses of existing solutions has increased the demand for standards based security mechanisms for network time synchronization protocols. This paper provides an overview of the general approach and discusses some key components being standardized as part of both the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and the IETF Network Time Security (NTS) efforts. It also discusses the underlying motivation and requirements driving these efforts and identifies some next steps and possible avenues of further investigation.