Group, The questions of network and radio security are being applied to industrial control systems, which is my field of endeavor.
Control systems also require an accurate sense of time of day, to stamp the time of events occurring in the controlled process. GPS is the preferred way to get accurate time, even though process sensors seldom sample faster than 120 times per second. These time stamps are required by government regulations in some industries. So, what are the threats to a GPS time receiver? Jamming is possible, or just overloading the receiver, but the receiver goes into holdover mode and keeps on ticking with the disciplined oscillator. This does little damage compared with jamming the transmissions of wireless sensors. Spoofing the time from a remote location seems impossible. Or is it just difficult? Security by obscurity is not secure. Continual time changes could confuse a control system that had scheduled activities, as well as mess up the trends and logs that record the history of the process. Thanks for any comments I can pass on in a talk on this subject. Bill Hawkins Observation: Passwords are merely obscure. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
