nanog mailing list archives

Re: Recent NTP pool traffic increase


From: Royce Williams <royce () techsolvency com>
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2016 06:23:45 -0900

On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 12:49 PM, Dan Drown <dan-nanog () drown org> wrote:
Quoting David <opendak () shaw ca>:

On 2016-12-19 1:55 PM, Jan Tore Morken wrote:

On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 01:32:50PM -0700, David wrote:

I found devices doing lookups for all of these at the same time

{0,0.uk,0.us,asia,europe,north-america,south-america,oceania,africa}.pool.ntp.org
and then it proceeds to use everything returned, which explains why
everyone is seeing an increase.


Thanks, David. That perfectly matches the list of servers used by
older versions of the ios-ntp library[1][2], which would point toward
some iPhone app being the source of the traffic.

[1]
https://github.com/jbenet/ios-ntp/blob/d5eade6a99041094f12f0c976dd4aaeed37e0564/ios-ntp-rez/ntp.hosts
[2]
https://github.com/jbenet/ios-ntp/blob/5cc3b6e437a6422dcee9dec9da5183e283eff9f2/ios-ntp-lib/NetworkClock.m#L122


That would make sense - I see a lot of iCloud related lookups from these
hosts as well.

Also, app.snapchat.com generally seems to follow just after the NTP pool
DNS lookups. I don't have an iPhone to test that though.


Confirmed - starting up the iOS Snapchat app does a lookup to the domains
you listed, and then sends NTP to every unique IP.  Around 35-60 different
IPs.

Anyone have a contact at Snapchat?

Looks like folks got in touch with them. Thanks!

https://community.ntppool.org/t/recent-ntp-pool-traffic-increase/18

Royce


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