The time server blog
Discover articles about the time server and time synchronisation
Time synchronisation is of paramount importance for industrial applications of many sectors. The energy sector is no exception. Using an accurate and reliable time is necessary for greater reliability and security, to anticipate and prevent breakdowns, bill consumption, as well as to test and check the proper operation of protection devices in energy production and management systems.
In security, video surveillance is paramount for protecting goods and people. However, it is essential that all video recordings are timestamped in an accurate and synchronised way so that they are reliable and legally admissible. To do so, it is necessary to use time servers.
Breakdowns and malfunctions are inevitable for both networks and equipment. This also applies to time synchronisation mechanisms on which rely several services and applications. While it is impossible to make a network completely fault-tolerant, it is possible, with good planning, to make it resistant to a significant number of breakdowns.
A new cybersecurity directive (NIS 2) will come into effect as of 2025. This directive will apply throughout Europe and aims to tighten obligations for businesses, with new requirements for data protection and compliance. A new requirement of the NIS 2 directive is the widening of the scope of application, therefore including several thousand organisations and an estimated 16,000 institutions in Europe. Faced with the rise of cybercriminality, this new application aims at strengthening the protection of information systems, IT networks and data.
The concept of Zero Trust Network first appeared in 2010 and introduces a new way of thinking the security of computer networks. It is opposed to the classical vision which consists in maintaining hackers outside the network, therefore making the inside of a network a poorly secured area. With this oldest vision, once a hacker enters the network, it becomes difficult to follow and prevent this hacker from accessing to all resources.
The NTP protocol broadcasts a time information within a network in order to make sure that all clocks on a network are synchronised with an acceptable offset. NTP is one of the first protocols to be introduced and it has met a great success. NTP is easy to implement since it operates on the Internet network and since there are public servers available to retrieve the time.
It is paramount to make sure that all machines on a computer network are synchronised for software or industrial operations of many economic sectors. There are several ways to time synchronise machines via the network. To do so, time synchronisation protocols are used to synchronise different machines by broadcasting timestamps. These protocols usually broadcast the time of a reference clock such as an atomic clock or a GPS. However, the more extended a network, the more difficult it can be to synchronise machines.
Nowadays, the most widely used protocols are NTP (Network Time Protocol) and PTP (Precision Time Protocol). Each one of these protocols meets specific purposes which are more or less suitable depending on required applications.
Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is a time synchronisation protocol which ensures that all clocks within the same network are synchronised with the minimum possible offset. To do so, the PTP protocol will broadcast the time of a reference clock, which is most of the time an atomic clock or a GPS.
The PTP protocol is standardised under the name IEEE-1588. The first version dates back to 2002. It has been developed to offer greater accuracy than existing protocols (such as NTP Network Time Protocol). PTP offers a theoretical accuracy in the nanosecond range on LAN networks.
The breakdown of a service within a computer network is an issue that must be avoided where possible, and resolved as quickly as possible when it could not be avoided.
When the service in question turns out to be an essential component of several other services such as time synchronisation via a time server implementing the PTP or NTP protocol, then the breakdown can have disastrous consequences. Fortunately, there are several ways to avoid such breakdowns to happen.