FSMLabs Cybersecurity Finite State Machine Labs Inc (FSMLabs) FSMLabs is a US (Austin, Texas) based technology development company focused on clock synchronization. FSMLabs’s “TimeKeeper® ”,software and hardware is employed by 6 of the world’s 10 largest banks, the InterContinental Exchange (owners of the NY Stock Exchange), and some of the most technically advanced electronic trading…
Apple Watch time technology The Apple Watch is claimed to have 50 milliseconds time accuracy Apple says its new consumer electronic watch will synchronize to within 50 milliseconds of UTC time. Most of our customers in the financial trading sector need time to be within a microsecond – 50 thousand times better, but we were…
Best Practices with TimeKeeper® SourceCheck (2016) The TimeKeeper ‘SourceCheck’ feature is an analytics and automated threat detection tool that allows TimeKeeper to detect bad time sources and switch away from them. Bad time can come from misconfiguration, equipment and software failures or intentional time based attacks. SourceCheck can detect and defeat them. SourceCheck combines a…
Around 2PM UTC, Google’s time starts to veer off in preparation for the leap second. Everyone else is reasonably solid. The base time here is provided by GPS. Time sources being monitored in parallel include several NIST sources, the Canadian time source (tac.chu.nrc.ca), Google, Apple, USNO, GPS and a local PTP source.
Fincial trading venues and trading systems operate so quickly and rely on clocks so deeply that events like the one noted in this FINRA report are more common than many understand “Of the five commenters that supported tightening clock synchronization requirements at least to some extent, all agreed that a millisecond standard is necessary given…
A customer recently pointed me at a series of blog posts about a project at a financial firm trying to comply with MiFID II clock regulations without TimeKeeper and “with minimum spend”. Reading the posts, it’s clear that costs are already well over what it would have cost them to buy TimeKeeper and they have…
“Of the five commenters that supported tightening clock synchronization requirements at least to some extent, all agreed that a millisecond standard is necessary given the speed of trading in today’s markets. For example, according to FSMLabs, FINRA’s proposal is “timely and necessary” because “[w]ide use of electronic trading systems and proliferation of trading venues make…
Algorithmic trading: Algorithmic trading records must be stored on an approved form accurate, time-sequenced records of all orders—whether placed, executed or cancelled. This rule applies not just to algorithmic trading, but to all trades; firms must keep for five years all the relevant data relating to all orders and transactions, whether for their own account…
TimeKeeper incorporates a defense-in-depth design to protect it from deliberate security attacks and errors due to equipment failure or misconfiguration. This engineering approach was born out of a conviction that precise time synchronization would become a business and regulatory imperative. Recent disclosures of still more security problems in the NTPd implementation of NTP show how…
Although we’re just technologists here, and not experts on European Union Regulatory Law, MiFID II is very specific: Operators of trading venues and their members or participants shall synchronise the business clocks they use to record the date and time of any reportable event with the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) issued and maintained by the…