[Ntp] NTS4UPTP Rev 03 - Formal request for WG adoption

[Heiko Gerstung <[e-mail]>]

Dear fellow NTP working group members,

 

I just submitted the latest revision of our NTS for Unicast PTP draft (-02) which you can find here:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-gerstung-nts4uptp/

 

 

Based on our experience of more than 20 years (NTP) and 15 years of PTP based network time synchronization for quite a large number of different applications and industries, we believe that the proposed draft will increase the number of potential use cases for unicast PTP by adding serious and sound security mechanisms to this protocol. It will enable users in a large variety of areas to transport highly accurate and reliable time over wide area networks and hard to protect large-scale private networks. 

 

Unicast PTP is a protocol that has been designed to be used in protected network environments and requires additional protection to allow using it in other types networks, i.e. the Internet or wide-area-networks where it is impossible to ensure that no malicious actor with access to the network can carry out various attacks. The proposed draft offers protection against most of the possible attacks. 

 

The authors acknowledge that other variants of PTP, namely the multicast and hybrid (i.e. unicast and multicast) forms, need to be protected as well. However, those forms are rarely used over wide area networks and are much more common in local area networks and protected network environments. Securing multicast and hybrid PTP requires a more complex solution and our expectation is that the proposed standard for securing unicast PTP will be completed faster due to the fact that we built it on the work that already went into RFC8915. The similarities in the key exchange phase of the protocol also offer an efficient way to implement combined NTS4NTP and NTS4UPTP key exchange service daemons and therefore helps to simplify deploying secure time synchronization solutions that support NTP, PTP or both in parallel. 

 

I therefore would like to formally request adoption of this draft by this working group and kindly ask you to review the draft, and send your questions, comments and general feedback to the WG and/or one of the authors of this draft.

 

Thank you and best regards,

  Heiko

 

 


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Heiko Gerstung 

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