Good Timing: Exploiting Entanglement for Secure Clock Synchronization
Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas at Austin
The ability to synchronize remote clocks is a surprisingly fundamental part
of civilian and military infrastructure, from cell phone networks to power grids,
onward to GPS and gravitational wave detection. Unfortunately, it is known that it
is not hard to spoof a GPS signal and use it to steer a target clock to a desired
time. Under non-adversarial conditions time synchronization is a hard physics problem;
when a malicious adversary is present, it becomes a task in secure metrology. I will
present a protocol inspired by the techniques from quantum communication that allows
secure synchronization of two remote clocks in the presence of a well equipped adversary.
The experimental implementation and initial experimental results will be discussed.