CAREER: Secure Timing Architecture for Untrusted Edge Systems

可靠的时间概念对于国家和工业基础设施（如智能电网和工业控制系统）的安全一直至关重要。随着虚拟现实、自动驾驶汽车、移动医疗和智能金融系统等网络边缘“人在环”系统的出现，时间原语的完整性对于用户安全和安全比以往任何时候都更加重要。尽管在隔离领域（如屏蔽硬件系统中的可信时钟源、安全时间同步协议和弹性高分辨率计时器）取得了进展，但在零信任边缘环境中实现广泛采用的安全时间架构受到两个关键挑战的阻碍。首先，受信任的处理器不提供对其计时源的安全和精确的访问。其次，没有一种通用的时间传输技术可以抵御网络中的延迟攻击，因此，现有的方法不适合在异构和大规模边缘部署中采用。提出的工作是为具有不同时钟的边缘系统提供端到端安全时间架构的第一次努力，用于时间戳和时间传输。该项目也是第一个研究安全时间协调的主动和被动感知机制。拟议的工作还研究了在5G网络中保护时间敏感网络的挑战，其特点是支持大规模新兴的时间关键型应用。该项目将通过新的时钟源、时间传输通道和网络协议推进最先进的安全定时技术。提出的交叉堆栈方法重新构想了时序的核心概念——所有网络系统使用的基本要素——并将为设计安全、可靠和高效的系统创建基础。多样化和安全的时钟源将使研究人员和行业合作伙伴能够支持在实际边缘部署中具有严格定时要求的新兴应用程序。该项目还为教育和推广创造了机会：作为网络安全研究所的一部分，该项目将把关于时间安全的研究纳入pi所在机构新的和现有的研究生和高级本科课程中。它将强调通过N2Women专业编程、机构多样性努力以及当地社区向女童子军的推广，增加不同学生群体对计算机的参与。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A reliable notion of time has always been critical for the security of national and industrial infrastructure, such as smart grids and industrial control systems. With the emergence of human-in-the-loop systems at the network edge, such as virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, mobile health, and smart financial systems, the integrity of timing primitives is more important than ever for user security and safety. Although there have been advances in isolated domains such as trusted clock sources in shielded hardware systems, secure time synchronization protocols, and resilient high-resolution timers, realizing secure time architectures for widespread adoption in zero-trust edge environments is hindered by two key challenges. First, trusted processors do not provide secure and precise access to their timekeeping source. Second, there is no universal time transfer technique that is resilient to delay attacks in the network, and hence, existing approaches are not suitable for adoption over heterogeneous and large-scale edge deployments. The proposed work is the first effort to provide an end-to-end, secure time architecture for edge systems with diverse clocks, for timestamping and time transfer. This project is also the first to study active and passive sensing mechanisms for secure time coordination. The proposed work also investigates challenges to secure time-sensitive networking in 5G networks, distinguished by support for emerging time-critical applications at large scales. This project will advance the state-of-the-art in secure timing with new clock sources, time transfer channels, and network protocols.The proposed cross-stack approach reimagines core concepts in timing -a fundamental primitive used by all networked systems- and will create a foundation for designing safe, secure, and efficient systems. The diverse and secure clock sources will enable researchers and industry partners to support emerging applications with strict timing requirements over real-world edge deployments. The project also creates opportunities for education and outreach: The project will incorporate research on time security into new and existing graduate and advanced undergraduate classes at the PIs' home institution as part of the Cybersecurity Institute. It will emphasize increasing participation among a diverse student population in computing via N2Women professional programming, institutional diversity efforts, and local community outreach to Girl Scout troops.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.