Securing Time in Energy IoT: A Clock-Dynamics-Aware Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Network for Clock Drift Attacks and Y2K38 Failures

TL;DR

This paper presents STGAT, a novel spatio-temporal graph attention network designed to detect clock drift, synchronization issues, and Y2K38 failures in energy IoT systems, significantly improving anomaly detection accuracy and response time.

Contribution

The paper introduces STGAT, a new framework combining drift-aware embeddings and graph attention to model and detect time anomalies in energy IoT devices, addressing limitations of existing models.

Findings

Achieves 95.7% detection accuracy on energy IoT telemetry data.

Reduces detection delay by 26%, with a 2.3-time-step response time.

Outperforms recurrent, transformer, and graph-based baselines significantly.

Abstract

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.