T1547.003: Time Providers
Essential information
- MITRE technique ID
T1547.003- Confidence
- 100/100
- Revoked
- No
- Published
- 16/12/2025 19:38
- Modified
- 27/03/2026 01:10
- Author / Source
- The MITRE Corporation
Aliases
T1547.003
Platforms
windows
Description
Adversaries may abuse time providers to execute DLLs when the system boots. The Windows Time service (W32Time) enables time synchronization across and within domains.(Citation: Microsoft W32Time Feb 2018) W32Time time providers are responsible for retrieving time stamps from hardware/network resources and outputting these values to other network clients.(Citation: Microsoft TimeProvider)
Time providers are implemented as dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) that are registered in the subkeys of `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\`.(Citation: Microsoft TimeProvider) The time provider manager, directed by the service control manager, loads and starts time providers listed and enabled under this key at system startup and/or whenever parameters are changed.(Citation: Microsoft TimeProvider)
Adversaries may abuse this architecture to establish persistence, specifically by creating a new arbitrarily named subkey pointing to a malicious DLL in the `DllName` value. Administrator privileges are required for time provider registration, though execution will run in context of the Local Service account.(Citation: Github W32Time Oct 2017)
Kill chain phases
| Kill chain | Phase |
|---|---|
| mitre-attack | persistence |
| mitre-attack | privilege-escalation |
Marking (TLP)
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