[ntp:hackers] Time over HTTPS Specification

Miroslav Lichvar mlichvar at redhat.com
Mon Nov 30 08:05:40 UTC 2015


On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:44:17PM +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> I have researched the "time over HTTPS" idea more, and nailed
> down some of the details.
> 
> I have also added a HTTP header the server can send to improve
> things to (almost) no end.
> 
> I have written the result up as a specification here:
> 
> 	http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20151129.html
> 
> Inputs, commentary, corrections etc are most welcome.

With the improved precision I think it would be good to add also a
a field for some upper bound on the error in the timestamp if it's
known, e.g. the esterror value from ntp_gettime(). Also, what should
happen when the clock is not synchronized? (STA_UNSYNC in the status)

Ideally this would be an NTP over HTTP/S specification, but I'm not
sure if anyone would be interested in implementing that as it would
require some integration with the NTP server, or at least the Web
server would have to act as as an NTP proxy.

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar


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