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What’s new: An assertion of time warfare by the U.S. against the Chinese.
Why it’s important: Time and timing are fundamental to all critical infrastructure and IT applications. They enable cellular telecoms, land mobile radios, SCADA systems, support electrical and water distribution systems, space-based and terrestrial navigation systems, and computer operations. Hacking a nation’s national time and timing could do real damage. Depending upon the type and amount it could disable sufficient systems to cause deaths and major societal upheaval.
What else to know:
China
- The Chinese national time architecture includes BeiDou and other satellites, nation-wide eLoran coverage from 10 transmitter sites, and a 20,000 km network of fiber with 294 timing stations. This fiber network is called the “High-precision Ground-based Timing System.”
- We understand that China’s timing architecture aims to synchronize all the various ways in which time and timing are delivered so that, regardless of which a user is accessing, they will have the same time as is provided by other sources. We have not read assertions of accuracy other than the differential eLoran achieving 20 nanoseconds.
- Based on other systems we speculate that the 10 eLoran sites and 294 timing stations all have their own clocks and can provide holdover and sync if the primary time source is unavailable.
United States
- In the U.S. authoritative time and timing are provide by the U.S. Naval Observatory for the Department of Defense, including GPS, and the National Institutes of Standards for civil applications other than GPS.
- While the U.S. certainly uses other clocks and fiber for time and timing, to our knowledge, there is not the same kind of integrated and synchronized timing architecture as is the case in China. Weak, easily jammed and spoofed GPS signals are the most widely used source of time and timing in the U.S. to the best of our knowledge.
China accuses US of cyber breaches at national time centre
By Liz Lee
BEIJING, Oct 19 (Reuters) – China has accused the U.S. of stealing secrets and infiltrating the country’s national time centre, warning that serious breaches could have disrupted communication networks, financial systems, the power supply and the international standard time.
The U.S. National Security Agency has been carrying out a cyberattack operation on the National Time Service Center over an extended period of time, China’s State Security Ministry said in a statement on its WeChat account on Sunday.
The ministry said it found evidence tracing stolen data and credentials as far back as 2022, which were used to spy on the staff’s mobile devices and network systems at the centre.
The U.S. intelligence agency had “exploited a vulnerability” in the messaging service of a foreign smartphone brand to access staff members’ devices in 2022, the ministry said, without naming the brand.
The national time centre is a research institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences that generates, maintains and broadcasts China’s standard time.
The ministry’s investigation also found that the United States launched attacks on the centre’s internal network systems and attempted to attack the high-precision ground-based timing system in 2023 and 2024.