Slave Clock Responses to Precision Time Protocol Attacks: A Case Study

The IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is very important for many financial and industrial applications, as it can provide highly accurate time synchronisation down to microsecond level. However, any PTP infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber-attacks that can de-synchronise some or all network devices, causing potentially destructive consequences. This paper will focus on how two of these attacks, the asymmetric delay and the byzantine attack, can be implemented in a PTP network, analyses their impact on slave clocks, and investigates how these attacks can be detected.

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