INVITED: Trusted Time for Untrusted Edge Systems

Time provides a network of computing devices in edge systems with the capability to timestamp, schedule, coordinate, and order events. This pervasive use of time makes it a lucrative target for attackers to acquire plentiful incentives. Even secure applications within shielded execution environments can be manipulated without a trustworthy clock source. This paper addresses the security of a fundamental primitive, a notion of time, that is essential for the safe and correct operation of all hardware, software, and networked systems. In the era of zero-trust environments, where privileged entities such as an operating system lie outside the trusted computing base, we note that all components in a time stack are vulnerable, which widens the attack surface for time-based services and gives rise to novel timing attacks. This research provides comprehensive design of a secure, precise, resource-efficient, and extensible timing architecture for edge systems in the presence of new timing vulnerabilities. This requires new system design, computation paradigms, algorithms, and network protocols to achieve the overarching vision for a secure time architecture.