Impact of Cyberattacks on Precision Time Protocol

The IEEE 1588 standard known as Precision Time Protocol (PTP) was developed to provide highly accurate and synchronized clocks for a wide range of applications. In particular, it is critical for latency-sensitive applications, such as enterprise-class financial transactions. In this paper, we analyze some of the security risks associated with this protocol, in particular, cyberattacks that disrupt the synchronization between multiple PTP devices or the synchronization between system clock and PTP hardware. We construct an experimental PTP test bed and perform the baseline measurements of synchronization between multiple clocks. We then demonstrate successful attacks that disrupt PTP synchronization, including vulnerabilities based on the lack of message authentication between master and slave clocks. Proposed mitigations of these vulnerabilities are discussed, in an effort to improve the next-generation implementations of this timing protocol or recommend additional external authentication devices in the network architecture.