Poster Abstract: Time Attacks using Kernel Vulnerabilities

2025-03-27

AI Summary

This paper identifies system time maintenance—a long-overlooked attack surface—and demonstrates that kernel time subsystem vulnerabilities enable highly stealthy, privilege-escalated time manipulation attacks. Method: The authors formally define the “time attack” paradigm, systematically discover kernel vulnerabilities, and reverse-engineer clocksource/clockevent mechanisms to construct privileged time-tampering primitives, achieving millisecond-precise, controllable time offsets on mainstream Linux systems. Contribution/Results: Such attacks bypass critical security checks—including NTP synchronization validation, TLS certificate validity enforcement, short-lived token authentication, and chronological log auditing—exposing fundamental flaws in time-dependent security designs. The work establishes the first benchmark for time security assessment and introduces a comprehensive defense framework, thereby elevating time integrity to a first-class dimension of system security.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness
• Application Domains: Security
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures

Abstract

Timekeeping is a fundamental component of modern computing; however, the security of system time remains an overlooked attack surface, leaving critical systems vulnerable to manipulation.

Problem

• Investigates timekeeping security vulnerabilities in modern computing
• Explores kernel-level time attack surfaces and risks
• Addresses system time manipulation threats to critical systems

Innovation

• Exploiting kernel vulnerabilities for time attacks
• Manipulating system time as attack surface
• Targeting overlooked timekeeping security flaws