Re: [Ntp] NTPv5 draft

[Hal Murray <[e-mail]>]

Salz, Rich said:
> My view is that it is no longer acceptable to design a protocol for
> deployment on the open Internet that has no authentication or message
> integrity and that people who disagree are out of consensus.

That seems like a good general principle, but doesn't seen to fit this example 
very well.

What do you mean by "has no authentication"?  Do you mean supports 
authentication or requires it?  I'll agree if you mean supports, but I assume 
you mean requires since otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Assuming you do mean requires, I'll pay a lot more attention to your argument if you outline a plan for getting the existing user base to demand authenticated time.

The complexity ratio between a simple non-authenticated NTP client and a client with authentication is enormous.

With HTTP to HTTPS, there was a lot of incentive for users and servers to upgrade.  Many did financial transactions over the web.  What's the equivalent for NTP?

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There is also an interesting operational side.  Authentication is only useful if you trust the authenticator.  I haven't seen any proposals for how the pool would support that layer of trust.

If you want the net to use authenticated time, I think you have to set up and run something similar to the root DNS servers -- that is a group of trusted people/organizations to run NTP servers that is large enough to support the load.

-- 
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