CICI: RSARC: Secure Time for Cyberinfrastructure Security

Clemson University, Clemson SC

Investigators

Abstract

The accurate marking and tracking of time plays a key role in scientific discovery and technology advancement. Scientific discovery is becoming increasingly reliant on more precise and reliable timekeeping. For example, the precise synchronization of time enables GPS (Global Positioning System) systems to accurately measure distances between distributed components of scientific instruments. Furthermore, tightly synchronized clocks between the base stations of mobile phone and data networks enable mobile handsets to share limited radio spectrum more efficiently. In fact, many modern critical infrastructures including computer networks, communication systems, electrical power grids, and financial networks rely on precise time and time synchronization for efficient ¬¬and safe operations. However, existing commonly used time synchronization approaches, including both GPS and the Network Time Protocol (NTP), are extremely vulnerable to attacks. As modern research cyberinfrastructure quickly evolves towards a distributed architecture with the incorporation of cloud computing resources and new forms of sensing and computing infrastructures, and as attacks on the time infrastructure have increased, developing secure time synchronization approaches for resilient time service is of paramount importance. The focus of this project is to provide novel and holistic approaches to enable time security for cyberinfrastructures that employ the two most commonly used time synchronization mechanisms, i.e., GPS based and NTP based synchronization. More specifically, the project seeks to provide a security solution as a national service for all civil GPS time users. It will also develop and prototype a redundancy based security solution to NTP synchronization with minimal extra communication overhead. The main thrusts are to: i) establish a reference GPS receiver and server at Clemson University that can be used for GPS receivers across the US to detect spoofing attacks by cross checking encrypted military code in GPS signals; ii) develop a pulse based redundant synchronization approach to verify the reliability of network time provided by NTP; iii) experimentally prototype the two secure time approaches on a flood monitoring platform and a weather station platform, and use them to secure Clemson's campus NTP timing network in collaboration with the Information Technology (IT) department.