Cer­tichron SecureNTP Ope­nAPI project is launched

We have been sit­ting on this since RSA2010 where it became obvi­ous based on the evo­lu­tion and accep­tance of cloud com­put­ing mod­els that a new ref­er­ence time prac­tice was needed. One which used a less network-​​centric but still con­trolled and authen­ti­cated time-​​transfer process. To meet this need we decided that the best solu­tion was to enable the Appli­ca­tions them­selves to call a time-​​service provider as a run­time request and that for most oper­at­ing envi­ron­ments this just replaces the get­time(); ser­vice with a vari­ant which actu­ally calls the NTP ref­er­ence device for that security/​evidence gen­er­a­tion model.

And so to make this idea a valu­able resource we present the Ope­nAPI for NTP Ser­vices. The require­ments of the API are to pro­vide Secure SNTP style ser­vices using both IPC and Berke­ley socket based com­mu­ni­ca­tion mod­els for dis­trib­ut­ing time with the asso­ci­ated proof­ing prac­tices to force the cre­ation of those nec­es­sary records to fully doc­u­ment time-​​control on the entire chain-​​of-​​custody for any dig­i­tal object.  The intent is to cre­ate a more application-​​infrastructure based time-​​evidence model for reduc­ing risk and pro­vid­ing bet­ter assur­ance in the records cre­ated therein and in doing so to local­ize the time ser­vice request and response to the appli­ca­tion and not just read­ing it from an unprov­able reg­is­ter in the HOST OS.

Appli­ca­tion level NTP Client — for Appli­ca­tions not the OS!

The Ope­nAPI is then an inte­grated OS Time Of Day (TOD) ser­vice replace­ment which in a local­ized cloud envi­ron­ment allows the HOST or other spec­i­fied ref­er­ence device to sup­ply time ser­vices to the vir­tu­al­ized plat­form at the appli­ca­tion layer itself. This resource cre­ates an NTP time-​​evidence ser­vice set which is called at the appli­ca­tion level to pro­vide all NTP time set­ting and remote time-​​content stamp­ing facil­i­ties pro­vided in the NTP ser­vice only to appli­ca­tions rather than the appli­ca­tions them­selves rely­ing on the HOST OS.

• This new facil­ity pro­vides an unprece­dented level of secu­rity and integrity in appli­ca­tion level time stamp­ing ser­vices rather than rely­ing on the HOST OS, and thus asso­ci­at­ing trusted time-​​transfer processes (set­ting, cal­i­bra­tion, equal­iza­tion and attes­ta­tion) directly with the relying-​​party application.

• This unique new model allows the intro­duc­tion of mod­u­lar and secure sources of time com­plete with their  nec­es­sary evi­dence mod­els as resources in the pro­duc­tion of trans­par­ent busi­ness systems.

Secure Time is gen­er­ally the Source of all Prov­able Evi­dence in Computers!

Our rea­son­ing is that since net­work­ing espe­cially in tightly cou­pled clus­ters and Cloud Sys­tems mod­els is today accom­plished through very high-​​speed chan­nels and many of them through shared mem­ory and sem­a­phores as well as Secure IPC tools, the issues of Net­work Latency are not such an issue and the fore­front of the time con­trol prac­tice is to build reli­able proof mod­els which are light-​​weight yet strong enough to prove them­selves accu­rate in the most strin­gent appli­ca­tions and use models.

For more infor­ma­tion on how you can par­tic­i­pate in Ope­nAPI or how your prod­ucts can use the Ope­nAPI to bring secure time into them directly, please con­tact us at <font color=”#0000ff” face=“Times New Roman” size=“3”>OpenAPI@Certichron.COM</font> or call your Cer­tichron Sales per­son at 800−511−2301.

What you don’t know about Dig­i­tal Evi­dence can kill your business.

You never thought about it before but how you prove what you said you did on the com­puter sys­tems you accom­plish your busi­nesses work on is key to how much it costs to oper­ate your busi­ness. Infor­ma­tion Risk and Busi­ness Process Con­trol are becom­ing key fac­tors in man­ag­ing any and all risks in oper­at­ing an entity.

The world of an implied knowl­edge of infor­ma­tion secu­rity requirements

In today’s world where per­sonal infor­ma­tion is pro­tected by law and process con­trol integrity is man­dated by leg­isla­tive reg­u­la­tion, the processes through which the entity cre­ates endur­ing proof of its proper oper­a­tions are key to mak­ing informed business-​​centric deci­sions at all levels.

This was nowhere more dri­ven home than in Cal­i­for­nia State’s Khaled rul­ing that Red Light Cam­era sys­tems in place at the time of the rul­ing were hear-​​say evi­dence gen­er­a­tors mean­ing their very design was flawed. What they would need are processes which pro­vide the miss­ing pieces of exist­ing evi­dence mod­els which implies that most if not all of the sys­tems in place were not designed to com­ply with or oper­ate under today’s evi­dence requirements

Adding a new Evi­dence Com­pe­tence Step to Audit and Design Processes

To meet this new need, that means the addi­tion of an Evi­dence Strength and Facil­i­ta­tion Met­ric to all processes. That’s really just fancy talk for a process that eval­u­ates the math­e­mat­i­cal strength of the computer’s secu­rity and infor­ma­tion integrity con­trols to cre­ate a sim­ple Process Risk Coef­fi­cient, what we refer to as the PRC in the risk domain.

Com­puted ContinualCompliance

For those look­ing for a solu­tion for this Cer­tichron meets this need through its pro­pri­etary and patent applied for Con­tin­u­al­Com­pli­ance practice.

Con­tin­u­al­Com­pli­ance is a unique approach to data proof­ing and its adop­tion by an entity cre­ates a process where a reli­able set of Foren­sic Teleme­try &trade; is installed so that the busi­ness prac­tices being mon­i­tored prov­ably use the source of time for this time­stamp ser­vice model that is used to con­trol this process.

How this magic works is that every process a com­puter per­forms is dig­i­tal in nature so the idea that a secu­rity model can actu­ally be cre­ated which is com­puted based on con­tent and cer­ti­fied processes is a no-​​brainer. Its just never been done because of the size of the evi­dence cre­ated for each event case. But with today’s stor­age sys­tems being what they are this is no longer a hur­dle.  By cre­at­ing a set of uni­form time­stamps which tag and prove con­tent at stages the cor­rect­ness of any event thread can be “solved for com­plete­ness and cor­rect summing”.

How do I use this?

Certichron’s Con­tin­u­al­Com­pli­ance prac­tice process pro­vides a set of tools to insure key con­trol events are time­stamped through a part of the same evi­dence con­trol prac­tice the entity uses to set their time-​​of-​​day clocks and gen­er­ate their third-​​party evi­dence of proper track­ing of the time-​​of-​​day in their key sys­tems. The SecureNTP DES ser­vice from Cer­tichron is used in addi­tion to the SecureNTP server cal­i­bra­tion and infra­struc­ture con­trol ser­vice to prov­ably doc­u­ment an enti­ties proper syn­chro­niza­tion, end to end.
 
From a finan­cial or evi­dence stand­point Con­tin­u­al­Com­pli­ance cre­ates a com­pu­ta­tional model for rep­re­sent­ing any form of content-​​event sup­port­ing any and all mime types. What this means is that vir­tu­ally any type of ser­vice process can be instru­mented to pro­vide proper and end-​​to-​​end foren­sic ser­vices with the addi­tion of the Cer­tichron DES and SecureNTP DES ser­vice partnership. 

Con­tact us!

For more infor­ma­tion on how to imple­ment you own digital-​​evidence cen­tric prac­tice con­tact sales@​certichron.​com or call us at 800−511−2301.

In direct oppo­si­tion to the DoD Ban on unen­cryupted GPS for any offi­cial pur­pose beca­sue of its spoofa­bil­ity and lack of secu­rity, the Mass­a­chu­setts State Supreme Judi­cial Court ruled that GPS data from a 2004 case is reli­able evi­dence for prosecution.

• http://​www​.salem​news​.com/​l​o​c​a​l​/​x​1​7​0​3​9​4​6​8​4​2​/​C​o​u​r​t​-​r​u​l​e​s​-​G​P​S​-​e​v​i​d​e​n​c​e​-​i​s​-​a​d​m​i​s​s​i​ble

The Court’s response was: “Our pre­em­i­nent con­cern with respect to the evi­dence pre­sented and con­sid­ered at revo­ca­tion pro­ceed­ings is its reli­a­bil­ity,” Jus­tice Robert Cordy wrote in the deci­sion. “If the evi­dence is admis­si­ble under stan­dard evi­den­tiary rules, it is pre­sump­tively reli­able. If it is not admis­si­ble under such rules, a judge must inde­pen­dently eval­u­ate its reli­a­bil­ity.” That makes sense since the data was cap­tured in 2004 but later in this response will will point out that the DoD banned the use of L1 GPS in 1998, so even in 2004 it was known how inse­cure GPS data reports were. There is also another issue this rul­ing cre­ates and that is the Couurt’s set­ting prece­dents which per­tain to tech­nol­ogy which is now no longer secure. In 2010 (today) this rul­ing per­tains to an event which hap­pened in 2004, and since then the tech­no­log­i­cal basis of GPS secu­rity mod­els has changed, it is no longer as secure as it was in 2004. The prob­lem we are con­cerned with is then that this 2010 rul­ing paves the way for more par­ties to side­step tech­nol­ogy changes and read­ily avail­able infor­ma­tion in the hacker and gen­eral access com­mu­ni­ties. As such the rul­ing is dan­ger­ous in my opin­ion, and as to why read on…

Joint Chiefs of Staff ban GPS L1 use in 1998

With the ver­i­fi­ca­tion of the GPS data admis­si­bil­ity, what the court didn’t review was that the offi­cial Fed­eral Pol­icy from the DoD on the use of L1 GPS or that of the DoE. In fact the DoD banned the use of the un-​​encrypted GPS ser­vices in 1998 and that was never fac­tored into the Court’s deci­sion. The 1998 order of the Joint Chiefs forces all Mil­i­tary users of GPS to switch to the SAASM encrypted ser­vice or L2 GPS which has its own secu­rity. It was delayed to Octo­ber 1^st 2006 as to its effec­tive date but the DoD pol­icy about stan­dard posi­tion­ing sys­tem use with­out SAASM was in fact set in 1998 mean­ing that every­one in the DoD and the real world of the Gov­ern­ment itself knows about these liabilities.

The DoE also has spe­cific guid­ance on the lia­bil­i­ties and has staged actions with the FBI to hijack GPS tracked vehi­cles to doc­u­ment the secu­rity lia­bil­i­ties of GPS Data. That the Court refused to review this vio­lated the Sua Sponte respon­si­bil­ity the Court has to deter­mine fact and in this rul­ing is effec­tively rewrit­ing Physics Texts to side­step the fact that whether they rename RED as BLUE, it still will be RED.

Searches — do the diligence

Try this GOOGLE Search and notice every­one talk­ing about the SAASM Man­date from the Joint Chiefs (JCoS), this is the most heav­ily guarded ‘secret’ from the pub­lic and it is the GPS Indus­try which will loose bil­lions of dol­lars of profit if the truth about the GPS sys­tems lia­bil­i­ties for trust-​​transfer are reviewed with regard to its inabil­ity to cre­ate reli­able evi­dence is found out… don’t believe me — do the searches here.

SAASM Man­date

The JCoS order that “no unen­crypted GPS L1 Sys­tems will be pur­chased because of their lack of secu­rity and spoofability/​jamming ease” can be seen all over the GPS world:

• http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us%3AIE-SearchBox&q=joint+chiefs+SAASM+mandate&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
• US DoE offi­cial GPS Vul­ner­a­bil­ity Assess­ment Team at LANL: http://www.né.anl.gov/capabilities/vat/spoof.html
• Finan­cial aspects of GPS reliance: http://​philose​cu​rity​.org/​2​0​0​8​/​0​9​/​1​1​/​g​p​s​-​a​n​d​-​w​a​l​l​-​s​t​r​eet
• Arti­cle on Jon Warner’s GPS tracked “Gaso­line Truck Hijack­ing” which is spe­cific to this case and the use of GPS in any vehi­cle track­ing require­ment: http://​philose​cu​rity​.org/​2​0​0​8​/​0​9​/​0​7​/​g​p​s​-​s​p​o​o​f​ing

.

GPS and Cel­lu­lar Jammers

Based on the tons of well known data, the Supreme Judi­cial Court in its GPS rul­ing failed to take actual real evi­dence into account and doc­u­mented its fail­ing as an objec­tive forum. The physics of the issue are well known and very well doc­u­mented. The L1 GPS sys­tem can be shut­down from a ground-​​station per­spec­tive with about $20 in parts. Addi­tion­ally today there are com­mer­cial jam­mers avail­able as off the shelf devices from mul­ti­ple vendors

US Coast Guard warn­ing about Tandy/​Radio Shack and other TV Ampli­fiers in response to a GPS out­age for all of Moss Land­ing (a Mon­terey Cal­i­for­nia sub­urb) for 37 cal­en­dar days. The ampli­fier is $20… the area blacked out by this device was about a kilo­me­ter and a half wide cir­cle mean­ing any GPS device stay­ing into that area would be dead while it was inside that area http://www.uscg.mil/hq/cg3/cg3pcx/publications/alcoast/alcoast-298–03.asp

Spoof­ing L1 GPS Sys­tems such that any records are cre­at­able as needed costs only mar­gin­ally more.

As a demon­stra­tion of how bad GPS is as a source of Court Admis­si­ble evi­dence we took a stan­dard offender track­ing bracelet and showed how with sim­ple equip­ment avail­able through a Google Search, that bracelet could be jammed. The Judge we actu­ally per­formed this for stood there as the blood drained from his face as he real­ized that the evi­dence model they present is use­less. We took it a step far­ther and then showed him what could be done with a GPS Test/​Simulator Appa­ra­tus like a LAB­SAT (http://​lab​sat​.co​.uk/) sys­tem from Race Logic. What came to this Jurist was that evi­dence could be fab­ri­cated through the use of GPS L1 sys­tems and that they were unac­cept­able for use in any key crit­i­cal appli­ca­tions such as the track­ing of cer­tain high-​​risk parties.

In clos­ing: What to do about the situation

The real­ity is that any­one with a LAB­SAT and six of those $20 ampli­fiers can make a L1 GPS sys­tem say any­thing they want it to… mak­ing it an unac­cept­able source of evi­dence for courts. From our per­spec­tive it is not too late for the Court to review the actual evi­dence about the physics of GPS and the evi­dence GPS based appli­ance sys­tems cre­ate, and if so war­ranted to reverse itself based on its finally review­ing the tons of evi­dence out there. We feel the data clearly proves that the GPS L1 Sys­tem is now nei­ther reli­able (from a “Evi­dence Sense”) or trust-​​able with­out other over­sight con­trol­ling that trust. In clos­ing if GPS is used for human over­sight based nav­i­ga­tion appli­ca­tions, it is won­der­ful but because of how eas­ily the data model is manip­u­lated this is not a source of infor­ma­tion which could be court admis­si­ble with­out sec­ondary con­firm­ing information.

Rogue Radio Shack $20 TV Ampli­fier takes Moss Land­ing GPS Ser­vices out for 37 days.

In early 2001 a rogue TV Ampli­fier on a sail­boat in the Moss land­ing har­bor was left turned on and because of a prob­lem with the antenna lead became a source of GPS inter­fer­ence in Moss Land­ing Cal­i­for­nia. The out­age was so dra­matic it caused the US Coast Guard to issue spe­cific guid­ance on the use of the low-​​cost “pow­ered TV ampli­fiers” since they can become radi­a­tors of broad-​​spectrum inter­fer­ence which takes GPS down hard.. This GPS Ser­vice out­age also caused sev­eral research vessel’s IT teams to snap into action, but the bad news is that with all that brain-​​power it still took a month to solve mean­ing that “GPS Out­ages are com­plex to ana­lyze and very easy to cause”. The evi­dence spe­cific impli­ca­tions of this are self-​​evident.

GPS as a source of trustable time for Smart­Grid or Red­Lightr Cam­era Operations?

Think what an out­age of this type would do to a GPS based smart­grid or red­light cam­era based appli­ca­tion.  In fact for that mat­ter think of that since GPS is unprov­able as a legally prov­able source of evi­dence of any­thing. Whether it works cor­rectly most of the time is not the issue, the issue is whether for the pur­poses of a law enforce­ment prac­trice or legal mat­ter whether some­thing with known lia­bil­i­ties and eas­ily dis­rupted ser­vices pro­vides a reli­able enough solu­tion for trust processes as an “Anchor for treat­ing portable trust” services.

• For infor­ma­tion on the search for the jam­ming source see the GPSWorld arti­cle at http://​www​.gpsworld​.com/​g​n​s​s​-​s​y​s​t​e​m​/​s​i​g​n​a​l​-​p​r​o​c​e​s​s​i​n​g​/​t​h​e​-​h​u​n​t​-​r​f​i​-​776

A local copy of the USCG Notice page can be seen at:

• USCG Report on TV Amplifiers

California’s Orange County sets for­mal stan­dard for court admis­si­bil­ity of dig­i­tal sur­veil­lance data.
The term Trust­wor­thy was used in numer­ous barbs in the rul­ing with estab­lishes a legal-​​compliance hur­dle for any com­mer­cial enti­ties doing busi­ness in the Orange County area includ­ing as it hap­pens, any and all con­trol processes in the used in admin­is­ter­ing since “sur­veil­lance data” is in fact just the out­put of a set of processes which are accorded spe­cific sta­tus in the real world.

So what does this mean with sys­tems or enti­ties deliv­er­ing elec­tronic ser­vices of any type to Orange County Enti­ties? Since they are required to pro­duce evi­dence mod­els com­pli­ant to lev­els which meet the Khaled stan­dard any ser­vices which they pur­chase, use, resell, or pro­duce in Orange County must meet those.

This then means any and all Energy, Water or other util­i­ties or for that mat­ter any oper­at­ing data which pro­duces reports on what other sys­tems or con­trols includ­ing sur­veil­lance data (dig­i­tal video) and inte­grated elec­tronic sur­veil­lance (sys­tems which watch other sys­tems or process flows) are con­trolled by Khaled.

• PUC Fil­ing — Docket num­ber 1007015 Peti­tion to amend PUC data man­age­ment prac­tice rules.
• KHALED
• 32733089-​​ca-​​khaled

For the rest of the State of Cal­i­for­nia, it means Khaled is now the inter­op­er­abil­ity goal for other coun­ties. The rul­ing is also dri­ving other States to turn off their Red-​​Light Cam­era sys­tems (15 of them to date) so it is an impor­tant one.

Our analy­sis
Cer­tichron believes that con­trol and cer­ti­fied sur­veil­lance sys­tems which add the legally defined min­i­mums must be avail­able every­where. To enable this suc­cess­ful deploy­ment on secure time as a trust-​​anchor of reg­u­la­tory man­dated evi­dence trust­wor­thi­ness Certichron’s regional ser­vice cen­ters pro­vides access to the NIST time sources as the evidence-​​source for all foren­sic con­trols con­tem­plated for in-​​place operations.

Adding secure time-​​stamping to exist­ing processes pro­vides all the required evidence-​​readiness and Certichron’s vision is a uni­fied evi­dence model every­where, one which allows mechan­i­cal review of its integrity and events.

Stay tuned for more infor­ma­tion on Khaled and its applic­a­bil­ity in the use most of SoCalEdison’s area of the County of Orange.

For those of you not aware — there was a very impor­tant rul­ing out of the Orange County Appel­late called Cal­i­for­nia v Khaled which set new evi­dence stan­dards for “Unat­tended evi­dence col­lec­tion devices and sys­tems” in use as to what is admis­si­ble before Cal­i­for­nia Courts.

While the core focus on this would be speed-​​trap type cam­eras this also clearly applies to “any and all devices which would col­lect evi­dence which would be used in a crim­i­nal or civil pros­e­cu­tion” which means Smart­Grid too… yeah that’s right, since a power meter is used to pro­duce evi­dence before the Pub­lic Util­i­ties Com­mis­sion or the Cal­i­for­nia Court’s it means the Smart­Grid and in par­tic­u­lar the meters are them­selves cov­ered as Evi­dence Col­lec­tion Devices too.

Cer­tichron serves CPUC notice of Khaled Rul­ing
To help sup­port the imme­di­ate adop­tion of this same rul­ing in Cal­i­for­nia Util­ity Law, Cer­tichron served the Cal­i­for­nia PUC for­mal (elec­tronic) notice that this prece­dent per­tains to “any and all sys­tems used in energy or util­ity oper­a­tion, deliv­ery of ser­vice, or through which a ser­vice con­trolled under the PUC’s char­ters, were directly con­trolled under this same prece­dent because they pro­duce content-​​records which are used in rec­on­cil­li­a­tion of finan­cial mat­ters which are for­mally reg­u­lated at the State and Fed­eral level, and for which that con­tent would come to be admit­ted as evi­dence for­mally before a Arbi­tra­tion, Medi­a­tion in civil mat­ters, or Court pro­ceed­ing in both civil and crim­i­nal mat­ters per­tain­ing to the oper­a­tions of those pub­licly reg­u­lated services”

The effect of this fil­ing
What this post­ing to the CPUC does today is sup­ports a for­mal motion to the Admin­is­tra­tive Law Judges of the Cal­i­for­nia PUC that any and all Smart­Grid oper­a­tions must meet min­i­mum Dig­i­tal Evi­dence stan­dards for their oper­a­tion and have pub­lic structure/​architecture mod­els per sec­tions 10.3 and 10.4 of the PUC ser­vice code.

This for­mal motion was filed last Wednes­day and the post­ing this AM served as a sup­port­ing brief and Mem­o­ran­dum of Points and Author­i­ties fil­ing as a sup­ple­ment to the orig­i­nal motion and also noticed that one of the core tech­nolo­gies being used to cre­ate this evi­dence today, that being the unau­then­ti­cated L1 GPS ser­vice is eas­ily spoofed and jammed, and that as such it fails the evi­den­tiary tests now man­dated by Khaled.

See this related post for more information.

Why?
The intent is to set a stake in the ground for the basic level of com­pe­tence that any evi­dence should meet to be con­sid­ered ‘prov­able’ and for admis­si­bil­ity to State and Fed­eral Courts. The Fed­eral Courts have rul­ings like Lor­raine v Markel to sup­port real world con­trols under the Fed­eral Rules of Evi­dence but after the fiasco of the over­sight in the San Fran­cisco DA’s Foren­sic Lab­o­ra­tory, any device pro­duc­ing tes­ti­mony which is used to pros­e­cute any­thing, whether civil or crim­i­nal must meet a min­i­mum stan­dard of com­pe­tence or be rel­e­gated as hear-​​say and inadmissible.

The impli­ca­tions have broad reach­ing impact on all reg­u­lated com­mu­ni­ca­tions, util­i­ties, and media-​​delivery rules as well so it will be inter­est­ing to see how the court’s react to these man­dates and motions to cre­ate respon­si­ble evi­dence rules.

Cer­tichron has filed a for­mal motion to the Cal­i­for­nia Pub­lic Util­i­ties Com­mis­sion to ‘for­mally take notice that any and all sys­tems which it autho­rizes the use of must meet both Cal­i­for­nia and Fed­eral Evi­dence Stan­dards in addi­tion to all the other issues per­tain­ing to pri­vacy and con­trol of access to information.

The intent is to bring a clear focus to the Smart­Grid indus­try that any and all solu­tions fielded by it must meet “these sim­ple prece­dent sup­ported legal infor­ma­tion integrity and con­trol requirements”.

We will keep you informed through posts here as to the sta­tus of the Motion and the actions of the CPUC in sup­port­ing exist­ing State and Fed­eral Reg­u­la­tory require­ments for infor­ma­tion already in place in their Smart­Grid sys­tems authorizations.

Reg­u­la­tion means plan­ning for a strong evi­dence model

The L1 GPS evi­dence model is from a strength stand­point pretty poor, which is not to say the NavS­tar pro­gram is not an incred­i­ble boon to the Nation and the world as a whole. As a human-​​managed pas­sive nav­i­ga­tion bea­con GPS is a godsend.

The nav­i­ga­tion bea­cons from the GPS Sys­tem allows for any num­ber of key processes with proper over­sight to be imple­mented which before it would take a larger staff to imple­ment and the asso­ci­ated costs or just were impos­si­ble… so GPS is a fan­tas­tic tool for any num­ber of uses but as a trusted source of time for TOU billing the GPS sys­tem fails mis­er­ably, and the worst part is pretty much every­one in the GPS world knows this about L1 GPS sys­tems already.

L1 GPS is an unprov­able evi­dence source for time data for computers

What L1 GPS is not, is a good source of foren­sic evi­dence and the rea­sons are sim­ple. By design, the entire GPS sys­tem is a “pas­sive” bea­con of which there are three ser­vices, L1, L2 and L5 (L1 for the pub­lic, L1 encrypted and L2 for Mil­i­tary and the new L5 for Air Navigation).

And for L1, because of the unse­cured pub­lic trans­mis­sion mod­els there is no way to tell after the fact to deter­mine when or in what order the mes­sages were actu­ally received or more impor­tantly when in real-​​time (that being the real time here on Earth) that those mes­sages were received.

By the very design of the GPS, you would never ask the sys­tem for time, you lis­ten to it pro­claim­ing the time in its mes­sages. It is some device (the receiver) which re-​​packages that for con­sump­tion by other devices which is what is the issue here.

The flip side of that same coin is also a hur­dle to get over and that is that GPS L1 ser­vices are known to be eas­ily spoofed and replayed. Here for instance is a link to an inci­dent which hap­pened in Moss Land­ing Cal­i­for­nia which took the GPS ser­vice for about 1 nau­ti­cal mile down with the epi­cen­ter of that being the Moss Land­ing Harbor.

GPS dead in Moss land­ing for 37 days

The prob­lem was it took 37 (thirty seven) days to find the source and fix it so the GPS ser­vice was out for a full month. Addi­tion­ally GPS ser­vices are taken off line peri­od­i­cally by the Air Force as part of the main­te­nance of the sys­tem. Energy and Water providers who use GPS for their TOU local clock sources must take into account that their sys­tem is nei­ther prov­able nor reli­able such that there must be some form of fail-​​over to the entire time-​​service infra­struc­ture to be safe to deploy in a Smart­Grid operation.

• US Coast Guard Report on TV Jam­mer Out­age in Moss Land­ing

The Fed­eral Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion iden­ti­fied the fol­low­ing mod­els of anten­nas as hav­ing poten­tial prob­lems dur­ing inves­ti­ga­tions of GPS interference:

• TDP (Tandy Dis­tri­b­u­tion Prod­ucts) Elec­tron­ics – MINI STATE Elec­tronic Ampli­fied UHF/​VHF TV Antenna – Mod­els 5MS740, 5MS750, 5MS921
• Radio Shack Cor­po­ra­tion – Long Range Ampli­fied Omni Direc­tional TV Antenna – Model 15–1624
• Shake­speare Cor­po­ra­tion – Sea­Watch – Mod­els 2040 (Code date 02A00), 2050 (Code date 03A00)

What this means that since L1 GPS mes­sages are eas­ily spoofed, cap­tured and replayed or just plain jammed through silly and inex­pen­sive devices avail­able every­where today they need some­thing more to make them cred­i­ble sources of time in Smart­Grid and other appli­ca­tions, some­thing like Certichron’s SecureNTP as an evi­den­tiary trust anchor.

In Smart­Grid world what this would have meant is that the PG&E Moss Land­ing Power Plant would have been offline from the GPS ser­vice for the full period (all 37 days) as would most all of the sur­round­ing city of Moss Land­ing and parts of Marina as well mean­ing the local Auto­mated Sub­sta­tion sys­tems would also most likely be ‘out’.

It is because of these lia­bil­i­ties that util­i­ties deploy­ing GPS need to prop­erly bal­ance their use of GPS with an authen­ti­cated time-​​service to pro­vide the miss­ing anchor and to address times when GPS is unavail­able or turns out to be wrong. The rea­son for this is that prov­able time-​​management takes a trusted third party who oper­ates some reli­able evi­dence grade time ser­vice to ref­er­ence against. With­out that ref­er­ence the evi­dence is all pretty much hear-​​say because the par­ties who are mak­ing those asser­tions prob­a­bly have no idea how time in their meter was managed.

GPS is a key piece of the Crit­i­cal Infrastructure

America’s CI is stronger because of GPS but when GPS is deployed in inap­pro­pri­ate and at-​​risk reg­u­lated enti­ties to pro­vide com­pli­ance with things it is not capa­ble of, in those instances a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion to put in place the trust aspects not pro­vided by GPS is an appro­pri­ate solution.

This is a seri­ous issue for SmartGrid’s and Certichron’s SecureNTP Smart­Grid offer­ing meets this by inject­ing an inter­ac­tive NIST-​​calibrated time man­age­ment part­ner­ship into any and all lay­ers of the SmartGrid’s oper­a­tions from the Meter, Col­lec­tor or Sub­sta­tion Sys­tems, and finally to the ESP or provider.

GPS out­age is an alert about U.S. mil­i­tary reliance on devices, expert says
12:00 AM CDT on Wednes­day, June 2, 2010
Dan Elliott, The Asso­ci­ated Press

DEN­VER – A prob­lem that ren­dered as many as 10,000 U.S. mil­i­tary GPS receivers use­less for days is a warn­ing to safe­guard a sys­tem that ene­mies would love to dis­rupt, a defense expert says.

http://​www​.dal​las​news​.com/​s​h​a​r​e​d​c​o​n​t​e​n​t​/​d​w​s​/​n​e​w​s​/​n​a​t​i​o​n​/​s​t​o​r​i​e​s​/​D​N​-​g​p​s​g​l​i​t​c​h​_​0​2​n​a​t​.​A​R​T​.​S​t​a​t​e​.​E​d​i​t​i​o​n​2​.​2​9​8​8​5​d​9​.​h​tml

Time for today’s Smart­Grid
Cer­tichron is mov­ing rapidly into mass-​​trust sys­tems for util­i­ties with time as their con­trol fac­tor. We see time in the power-​​grid as a strong offer­ing we pro­vide trust through. Smart­Grid sys­tems need a trusted third party to insure (and ensure) their trans­parency to sup­port the new rate sched­ules being devel­oped to enable oper­a­tions of the client’s meter as a pur­chas­ing and recep­tion agent for a com­mod­ity service.

FINRA OATS 7430 Com­pli­ance in the Meter!
Certichron’s sys­tem deliv­ers a level of evi­dence which cre­ates a uni­formly prov­able time-​​service, one which not only gets the Last Mile Oper­a­tor past the “Because I said so” hur­dle but also stream­lines dis­pute res­o­lu­tion and over­all reg­u­la­tory com­pli­ance. SecureNTP does all this and more in what it enables in appli­ca­tion ser­vices in user inter­faces and other util­ity con­texts. The sys­tem meets FINRA OATS 7430 com­pli­ance require­ments so it will be able to meet all fed­eral reg­u­la­tions for the puchase of energy com­modi­ties on todays mar­kets or throug brokerages.

Why a Trusted Third Party?
As more and more DER and Co-​​Gen providers hawk their energy proper deliv­ery cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in the form of time­stamps will be nec­es­sary to fully com­ply with OATS 7430 and the other relevent stan­dards that will need to be com­plied with. Since FINRA’s OATS 7430 is the most dif­fi­cult Certichron’s sys­tem prop­erly deliv­ers this level of ser­vice so that the Meter type can selec­tively use time ser­vices at the sub­sta­tion, col­lec­tion radio or actual meter whether RF or DASH7 based. Certichron’s oper­a­tions bridge time­set­ting and man­age­ment in a DNP3 envi­ron­ment as well as those of higher level TCP/​IP worlds.

Granted Sta­tus
As part of this effort Cer­tichron was for­mally granted “Sta­tus” before the Cal­i­for­nia Pub­lic Util­i­ties Com­mis­sion and will take a lead­ing role in mak­ing NIST time the core of US Util­ity oper­a­tions over the next decade!

Stay tuned for more on using SecureNTP to insure proper charge-​​time cor­re­la­tion for TOU based billing systems