A lightweight secure time synchronization mechanism for ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 sensor networks

In sensor network, ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 standards attach significance for its provided communication and information models which facilitate the access of smart sensor to a network. As a distributed system, many applications and protocols in ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 sensor network require common clock through time synchronization. Ensuring the security of time synchronization sets significant foundation to basic communication. In this paper, we proposed a lightweight secure time synchronization mechanism for ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 sensor network which takes the security requirements including authentication, integrity, confidentiality, nonrepudiation and availability into consideration. Authentication phase, timestamp transfer phase and synchronization phase comprise the main steps for the time synchronization. Strong authentication provides basis for security protection. Lightweight encryption algorithm is utilized for more precise time synchronization. Discussion and simulation result are given to support the efficiency of the lightweight proposed secure time synchronization.