A Security Management Architecture for Time Synchronization Towards High Precision Networks

Time synchronization is quickly becoming a fundamental prerequisite for a smart society. With the development of the fifth-generation (5G) network, time-sensitive networking (TSN), and the rise of high-precision networks, its accurate and reliable features have attracted an increasing amount of attention. As the most promising protocol with sub-microsecond accuracy, precision time protocol (PTP) has been widely used for network synchronization, and its proper operation and security are critical to the industries that build the infrastructure for a smart society. In order to provide synchronization security as a service, this paper presents a scheme based on software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) principles for synchronization security. Security management is built as a virtual network function (VNF), and a mitigation mechanism is proposed to detect delay attacks and generate countermeasures. Finally, we investigate the impact of random delay attacks, constant delay attacks, and linear delay attacks and verify the performance of the proposed mitigation mechanism through experiments. The results show that the scheme is capable of detecting PTP delay attacks and mitigating their impact on time synchronization.