Exploring and Exploiting Synchrony Limitations of Time-Triggered Network-Agnostic Guardians

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 26 Jun 2026] Exploring and Exploiting Synchrony Limitations of Time-Triggered Network-Agnostic Guardians Shreya Vithal Kulhalli, Mohammad Ibrahim Alkoudsi, Gerhard Fohler Time-triggered communication protocols rely on trusted components known as guardians to enforce adherence to predetermined network schedules. Network-agnostic guardians offer an efficient and scalable distributed solution with reduced implementation cost and complexity compared to network-aware alternatives. However, this efficiency is based on the guardian's dependence on the controlled node for clock synchronization, which introduces a vulnerability: a malicious node can exploit this dependency to launch timing attacks against its guardian and eventually interfere with messages from other nodes on the network. In this paper, we establish a theoretical lower bound on the attainable clock synchronization precision between a node and its network-agnostic guardian. Building on this result, we introduce a timing attack that leverages the unavoidably imperfect clock synchrony to cause controlled and undetected de-synchronization of the guardian. The attack enables a malicious node to cause collisions with targeted critical network messages. We evaluate the effectiveness of the attack using a FlexRay field bus network model implemented in the OMNeT++ simulation framework. Our results show that the attack is able to remain undetected with 100% success and disrupts the transmission of the critical messages of the target node by causing collisions with them with 100% success. Comments: Presented at the "29th International Symposium on Real-Time Distributed Computing" ISORC 2026 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) Cite as: arXiv:2606.27819 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.27819v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.27819 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Shreya Vithal Kulhalli [view email] [v1] Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:00:44 UTC (271 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.DC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)