A Review of Research on Secure Time Synchronization Technology of Precision Time Protocol

Abstract

Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is the core implementation of the IEEE 1588 standard and is widely used in areas such as power, industrial Internet, financial transactions and communications that require extremely high time synchronization accuracy. However, with the deployment of PTP in an open network environment, the security mechanism it lacked at the beginning of its design gradually exposed serious vulnerabilities and became an important target for attackers. In recent years, the security research on PTP has been deepened, covering multiple directions such as attack classification, protection methods, key management mechanism, protocol optimization and standard updates. This article is based on more than 40 relevant research literatures at home and abroad in the past decade, and conducts a systematic review of PTP security issues. First, the threat types under different attack models are summarized, including delayed attacks, replay attacks, message tampering, spoofing and denial of service, etc.; then, existing protection measures are sorted out, from the message authentication code (MAC) scheme of IEEE 1588 Appendix K, to multicast authentication mechanisms such as TESLA, IPsec/MACsec-based link encryption, hardware trusted nodes, blockchain and quantum cryptographic enhancement schemes, etc.; then, various key management and distribution strategies are analyzed, including NTS4PTP, centralized and distributed key exchange, post-quantum key negotiation and other technologies. The review shows that the focus of future PTP security research will focus on four directions: lightweight, high security authentication, low-latency key update, anti-quantum attack mechanism, and cross-layer comprehensive protection, so as to provide end-to-end verifiable security guarantees while ensuring nanosecond synchronization accuracy.