This is a genuine problem across a variety of platforms, not just IoT. There really is no great way to "solve" for trust when one party might have extremely stale information. Awareness of this problem is surprisingly poor.
In the next blog post of this series we want to introduce a new secure network time protocol based on blockchain technology and show how even the smallest devices can establish completely secure connections.
This is a pretty disappointing way to end the article. Most "solutions" end up being some form of obfuscation, I'd guess this is too.
A verifiable way to put bounds on time is a very useful thing. If you know the time within an hour or even within a day can be a big help. There are cases where I’ve used firmware build time as a lower bound for current time.
Comments
This is a genuine problem across a variety of platforms, not just IoT. There really is no great way to "solve" for trust when one party might have extremely stale information. Awareness of this problem is surprisingly poor.
This is a pretty disappointing way to end the article. Most "solutions" end up being some form of obfuscation, I'd guess this is too.
A verifiable way to put bounds on time is a very useful thing. If you know the time within an hour or even within a day can be a big help. There are cases where I’ve used firmware build time as a lower bound for current time.