Re: [Ntp] The NTP WG has placed draft-roughtime-aanchal in state "Call For Adoption By WG Issued"

[Miroslav Lichvar <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 10:30:23PM +0200, Marcus Dansarie wrote:
> As someone (Daniel or Watson?) said in today's interim meeting: the
> purpose of Roughtime is generally not to set the system's clock, but for
> other purposes such as certificate verification.

It would be good to explain that in the draft. But I'm not sure how
exactly that makes it different from NTP. An NTP client doesn't have
to synchronize the system clock and it doesn't need any special
privileges. There are of applications that don't trust the system
clock and use NTP to verify the current time, even though it might
seem like a terrible idea.

If I understand it correctly, Roughtime could be specified as an NTP
extension field, possibly as an extension to NTS. So, I think the
document should explain why a new protocol using a different transport
was needed. I guess one reason could be that Roughtime is easier to
implement than NTP, especially in some specific frameworks.

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar