Final Presentation EL1-075: “Bearer Independent Secure Time Transfer”

Last Updated: 26/01/2026 11:34     Created at: 26/01/2026 11:33

On 22 January 2026, Thales Alenia Space France, prime contractor in a consortium with Qascom, presented the results of NAVISP-EL1-075 (TWIST), which focused on the design of a low-cost secure time-synchronization service, necessary, for example, for the initialisation of Navigation Authentication services like OS-NMA.

The presentation covered the service-level requirement of an architecture using telecom constellations, it compared Over-The-Top (OTT) and integrated architectures, and it presented secure time-bounding algorithms.

It also reported performance assessments, testbed evaluations of the network protocols NTP/NTS, and scenario analyses across constellations and timestamping errors.

The presentation concluded that OTT enables sub-second bounds while integrated systems achieve higher precision (tens of milliseconds).

The activity was fully funded by ESA NAVISP Element 1, whose objective is to innovate PNT technologies. The slides can be accessed here.