Estimation Theory Based Robust Phase Offset Estimation in the Presence of Delay Attacks

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of robust clock phase offset estimation for the IEEE 1588 precision time protocol (PTP) in the presence of delay attacks. Delay attacks are one of the most effective cyber attacks in PTP, as they cannot be mitigated using typical security measures. In this paper, we consider the case where the slave node can exchange synchronization messages with multiple master nodes synchronized to the same clock. We first provide lower bounds on the best achievable performance for any phase offset estimation scheme in the presence of delay attacks. We then present a novel phase offset estimation scheme that employs the Expectation-Maximization algorithm for detecting which of the master-slave communication links have been subject to delay attacks. After discarding information from the links identified as attacked, which we show to be optimal, the optimal vector location parameter estimator is employed to estimate the phase offset of the slave node. Simulation results are presented to show that the proposed phase offset estimation scheme exhibits performance close to the lower bounds in a wide variety of scenarios.