Re: [Ntp] draft-ietf-ntp-roughtime-05: tag change makes implementation more complex

[Danny Mayer <[e-mail]>]

On 9/21/21 3:24 PM, Marcus Dansarie wrote:
> I'll hijack this thread in an attempt to answer a number of related
> Roughtime questions in the same place. Apologies in advance for that.
>
> On 2021-09-21 16:27, Danny Mayer wrote:
>> It would be helpful if you explained why you changed it in the first
>> place. I assume you had a good reason to do so.
> I was the one to initially suggest terminating the PAD tag with zeros
> instead of ones (0xff) back in 2019:
>
>> The PAD tag key is encoded as PAD\xff, while the SIG tag key is
>> encoded as SIG\x00. For consistency, this should be changed so that
>> both are terminated with \x00. Additionally, terminating the tag keys
>> with the NULL character will make displaying them easier on many
>> platforms.
> In short, terminating all "ASCII-style" tags shorter than four
> characters with zeros allows for unambiguous translation into 32-bit
> integer tags. The entire message is archived at:
> https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ntp/BSYmaFGoEYHNECg2Mc2qgjzQZh4/

It would make more sense to make all of the tags 4 ascii characters and 
be done with it. I also don't understand the need for PAD and that the 
message has to be at least 1024 bytes in length. The length of the 
message is included in the packet so such a requirement is unnecessary.

Danny