Securing Time in Energy IoT: A Clock-Dynamics-Aware Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Network for Clock Drift Attacks and Y2K38 Failures
It addresses time-synchronization issues for energy cyber-physical systems, offering a novel detection method.
The paper tackles the problem of time integrity vulnerabilities like clock drift and Y2K38 failures in energy IoT systems, introducing STGAT, which achieves 95.7% accuracy and reduces detection delay by 26% compared to baselines.
The integrity of time in distributed Internet of Things (IoT) devices is crucial for reliable operation in energy cyber-physical systems, such as smart grids and microgrids. However, IoT systems are vulnerable to clock drift, time-synchronization manipulation, and timestamp discontinuities, such as the Year 2038 (Y2K38) Unix overflow, all of which disrupt temporal ordering. Conventional anomaly-detection models, which assume reliable timestamps, fail to capture temporal inconsistencies. This paper introduces STGAT (Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Network), a framework that models both temporal distortion and inter-device consistency in energy IoT systems. STGAT combines drift-aware temporal embeddings and temporal self-attention to capture corrupted time evolution at individual devices, and uses graph attention to model spatial propagation of timing errors. A curvature-regularized latent representation geometrically separates normal clock evolution from anomalies caused by drift, synchronization offsets, and overflow events. Experimental results on energy IoT telemetry with controlled timing perturbations show that STGAT achieves 95.7% accuracy, outperforming recurrent, transformer, and graph-based baselines with significant improvements (d > 1.8, p < 0.001). Additionally, STGAT reduces detection delay by 26%, achieving a 2.3-time-step delay while maintaining stable performance under overflow, drift, and physical inconsistencies.