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

[Watson Ladd <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 12:06 AM Miroslav Lichvar <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> 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.

The signing negatively affects the possible timing accuracy, and you
need to track things differently on the server.

Based on discussions in Prague we're also adding TCP transport, which
doesn't work for NTP.

What are the benefits from adding it as an extension?