Re: can we talk about secure time?

["ncl () cock li" <ncl () cock li>]

On 20/12/14 03:27, Hanno Böck wrote:
> A strange discussion. Because ntp is insecure by design. It is an
> unauthenticated, insecure protocol that is suspectible to
> man-in-the-middle-attacks. Frankly, I don't care which implementation
> of an insecure protocol has less buffer overflows.

How broken are the authentication methods already present in ntpd?[1]
So far there appears to be only DES/MD5 keys, and with autokey, RSA/DH
(but apparently autokey doesn't work behind NAT?)
As far as I know, distros don't typically set these up, would it be
worth it to enable and improve on these, or just make something new?

Considering OSes already set up their own ntp pools[2], they could also
provide their own trusted keys in their ntpd packages.


[1] http://www.ntp.org/ntpfaq/NTP-s-config-adv.htm#AEN3143
[2] (ubuntu|openbsd|debian|netbsd|fedora).pool.ntp.org