Send in your ideas. Deadline December 1, 2024
Grant
Theme fund: NGI Assure
Start: 2022-06
End: 2023-11

Statime PTP Master

Statime - Zero-allocation cross-platform Precision Time Protocol

High-precision clock synchronization is becoming increasingly important in application areas such as high precision localization, finance, broadcasting, security protocols, smart grids, and cellular base station transmissions. The Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is widely used for these critical applications and it is therefore important for it to be as secure and reliable as possible.

We have previously developed the first iteration of Statime, an implementation of a PTP slave in the Rust programming language. The outcome of that project is a secure-by-design implementation, leveraging the Rust borrow checker to guarantee memory-safety. With this project, we will expand our implementation in two ways. Firstly, we will expand the feature set to include a PTP master, conforming to the IEEE standard for PTP (the 2019 version, IEEE1588-2019), so we can run a full PTP instance with the memory-safety guarantees that our implementation provides.

Secondly, our implementation will be able to run without an operating system or system allocator. Those properties make the implementation inherently portable and more reliable. Our concrete goal for this second phase is that it runs on the stm32f7 microcontroller, a device with built-in PTP Ethernet support, but otherwise limited capabilities.

Run by Tweede golf

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This project was funded through the NGI Assure Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 957073.