[ntp:questions] Re: Hardware SNTP server

Danny Mayer mayer at gis.net
Fri Sep 16 13:49:02 UTC 2005


Hiroshi Toriyama wrote:
> Danny Mayer wrote:
> 
>> However, in order to provide reliable time you need to know that the 
>> packet is coming from the place you think it is. In today's world it's 
>> necessary to secure the infrastructure. There too many people who now 
>> think it's a wonderful thing to attack various parts of the 
>> infrastructure. I have no idea what kind of thrill they get but it's a 
>> fact of life today. The only way to secure your NTP infrastructure is 
>> using autokey. If you don't have that you can't rely on the Stratum 1 
>> server.
> 
> 
> Thank you for your comment.
> I agree you that the time infrastructure should be protected by
> some security technology.
> 
> Beside the development of the high-throughput SNTP server, I'm
> participating in the development of Secure-Time-Stamping server
> based on the PKI or the link protocol.
> Through this development, I learnt security is a severe matter.
> 

This would be interesting to us though I am not sure in what way this
would be different from NTP in concept. Please elaborate or point us to
some documentation on this. NTP currently does not support PKI though it
could.

> Anyway,
> NTP should be protected also, but I believe non-security-protected
> server may be also worth existing for some restricted purposes
> including some kind of public services.
> 

Yes, many people don't bother to authenticate the servers and that's the
default in NTP. I'm not sure how much longer that can last before
someone gets burnt by an attack or interference on an NTP server.

> Do you think any of non-security-protected servers are useless
> or harmful?
> 

No, there are many uses for them, particularly for people who don't want
to sign up and get a key for a server. The SNTP clients don't use it and
  are quite happy with it. I suspect that > 99% of the users of NTP are
not using authentication, though I admit I have conducted no surveys. It
would be useful to have some actual facts about this instead of my
speculation.

Hopefully the larger corporate networks are taking steps and using
authentication, but I don't hold my breath on this one either. A great
deal depends on reliable accurate time particularly when it comes to
things like timestamping transactions, logging activities across a
network, securing your DNS infrastructure, etc.

Danny

> tori
> 




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