Re: [Ntp] NTPv5: big picture

[Paul Gear <[e-mail]>]

On 2/1/21 3:08 am, Salz, Rich wrote:
>>    I would say that the unifying themes for ntpv5 are greater flexibility, and higher accuracy, compared to ntpv4.  
> I would like to see security on that list.


Hi everyone,

I would like to add my agreement with the increased security
requirement, add another general theme which will, at times, need to be
traded off against some of the other requirements: commends itself for
wide deployability.

What I mean here is that we have the user base of the public pool, and
many other pools which are publicly-accessible but run independently
(e.g. Apple, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, Ubuntu) which collectively
amount to billions of users who depend on NTP, but many (most?) of whom
don't care much about accuracy and may even be ignorant of NTP's existence.

It's great to aim for making NTP more suitable for high-accuracy
environments which can currently only be served by PTP, but we shouldn't
do this at the cost of making NTPv5 less viable for adoption by those
billions by making it harder to deploy (e.g. by requiring changes to
every firewall which allows NTP, or making it hard to work out whether
you're looking at UTC or TAI time).

I'm not saying that the WG is failing at this presently.  But it's easy
to get preoccupied with time-nerd concerns and we need to work hard at
keeping the use case of the massive majority in focus.

Regards,
Paul