Impact of MACsec security on TSN traffic

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) defines mechanisms for the real-time communication of data over Ethernet networks. TSN provides a single, real-time capable, high-bandwidth, fault-tolerant, and interoperable network. Cybersecurity is a big challenge for TSN. Best Effort traffic can benefit from widely applied security mechanisms in IT networks, like TLS. But Scheduled traffic and even Reserved traffic require low-latency authentication and encryption mechanisms. In addition, the PTP synchronization layer shall be protected by combining security mechanisms at different levels. This contribution presents two TSN set-ups where hardware MACsec implementation has been tested. The first has focused on measuring switching latencies for different frame sizes, while the second one has evaluated the behavior of a specific TSN application under MACsec encryption and decryption hops.