Implementing Proposed IEEE 1588 Integrated Security Mechanism

A new revision of IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol is currently being developed, which will include revised specifications regarding security. The security mechanism consists of two verification approaches, immediate and delayed; we implemented both approaches on top of PTPd, an existing open source implementation of PTP. We support the immediate verification security approach using manual key management at startup, and we support the delayed verification security approach emulating automated key management for a set of security parameters corresponding to one manually configured time period. In our experiments, we found that added performance cost for both verification approaches was within 25 μs, and PTP synchronization quality remained intact when security was enabled.