SHA-3 based Message Authentication Codes to secure IEEE 1588 synchronization systems

Since the publication of IEEE 1588-2008 standard, the interest in giving cyber-security to Precision Time Protocol (PTP) traffic has increased. Therefore, several researches regarding security vulnerabilities and possible implementation improvements can be found in the literature. Particularly, SHA-1 and SHA-2 based MAC algorithms specified in the standard have already been proved to be suboptimal. In this paper, the utilization of new SHA-3 based MAC is proposed and both AES-128 and SHA-3 hardware implementations are compared in the context of PTP networks.