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12/10/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 12/10/2024 12:39

Grant Report: NTP TCP Services Daemon

10 December 2024

Grant Report: NTP TCP Services Daemon

By Harlan Stenn - President, Network Time Foundation, Inc.

2023 ARIN Community Grant Program Recipient Report

Network Time Foundation (NTF) received an ARIN Community Grant in 2023 to support its work to design, implement, and test a framework for a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Services Daemon to interact with the Network Time Protocol (NTP) Project's NTP Daemon (ntpd). The project also aimed to implement a basic management client to demonstrate functionality.

Based on the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), the NTP is a system to distribute and synchronize time on network devices. While UDP is the best-known choice for time synchronization on general networks, it is a suboptimal choice for access, authentication, key exchange, management, monitoring, or several other functions. TCP-based communications are a better choice for these. For years the NTP Project team contemplated how to best use TCP to implement those functions while waiting for the resources to fund development and deployment. The ARIN Community Grant allowed NTF to undertake that work with the goal of implementing and deploying the NTP TCP Services Daemon (ntptsd) to interact with the NTP Project's ntpd for key exchange, management, and monitoring.

Learn more about all the 2023 ARIN Community Grant Program Recipients.

Outcome and Impact of the Project

We have successfully implemented the basic framework of the ntptsd, upon which we can build all the features we want to include. We chose to implement it using libevent for its network connection and dispatch processing, saving us time and effort as we work to complete ntptsd and release it as part of NTP 4.4. We are able to test this framework with 'telnet,' or 'openssl s_client,' so we did not need to implement a basic management client as part of the initial framework step.

There is still lots of work to do to expand the functionalities and capabilities of this work, but we knew this; the goal was to get the framework started and working, and we have accomplished that goal. Network Time Foundation and the NTP Project gratefully appreciate ARIN's support and trust in us by awarding us this grant!

Watch the recording or read the transcript of the NTP TCP Services Daemon project update Harlan Stenn presented at the ARIN 53 meeting. 

What's Next?

Ntptsd will be used to provide a variety of TCP services for NTP, including support for RFC 8915 and Network Time Security (NTS), as well as a variety of other services, including monitoring, statistics, and Secure Network Time (our alternative to NTS). Over the coming months, this code will be published (via tarballs, BitKeeper repositories, and git repositories), culminating in the NTP 4.4 release. At that point, this work will reach many millions of people; a significant number of people and organizations in the ARIN region await the support for RFC 8915. Additionally, we expect ntptsd and some other planned improvements to ntpd to allow us to implement significantly reduced abuse vectors involving NTP.

About the ARIN Community Grant Program

ARIN provides financial grants in support of initiatives that improve the overall Internet industry and Internet user environment. Are you working on a project that advances ARIN's mission and broadly benefits the Internet community within the ARIN region through informational outreach, research, Internet technical improvements, or Registry processes and technology improvements? Visit the ARIN Community Grant Program page for more information and to find out how your organization can apply in 2025. For application tips and support, read this post on our blog.

Post written by:

Harlan Stenn
President, Network Time Foundation, Inc.

Harlan Stenn began programming computers in 1971. He holds a bachelors degree in Business Administration (Accounting) from The Colorado College in Colorado Springs, and an MSE in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis. He has worked directly with NTP since 1992 and has been managing NTF's progress in the first implementation of the Network Time Security draft IETF specification, driving NTF's General Timestamp API Project, and incorporating the Ntimed Project into NTF.

Any views, positions, statements, or opinions of a guest blog post are those of the author alone and do not represent those of ARIN. ARIN does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or validity of any claims or statements, nor shall ARIN be liable for any representations, omissions, or errors contained in a guest blog post.

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