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back to article 'Malicious time source' can poison Network Time Protocol

Get busy, sysadmins, there's a bunch of network time protocol (NTP) bugs to squash. The bugs were turned up in a code audit by Cisco's Talos business (which can surely feel the coals of hell being heaped upon its head for working in a Back to the Future joke in the bug-branding). Talos has been working on the code base of the …

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  1. Fazal Majid

    Or you could switch to the OpenBSD OpenNTPd

    I run it on Solaris and OS X (on a machine where the stock xntpd drifts uncontrollably by minutes a week), it's perfectly fine for most use-cases.

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    1. Naselus
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      Re: Or you could switch to the OpenBSD OpenNTPd

      "on a machine where the stock xntpd drifts uncontrollably by minutes a week"

      I've found this on OSX as well. Macbooks that are separated from the network will often go minutes out of sync before they're re-connected a few hours later.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Or you could switch to the OpenBSD OpenNTPd

        I've found this on OSX as well. Macbooks that are separated from the network will often go minutes out of sync before they're re-connected a few hours later.

        Interesting, is that because the OSX NTP implementation does not generate a drift file over time, or because the system clock is somehow unstable? Worth keeping an eye on.

        0 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Timely

    Did this come out on 'Back to the Future' day ?

    0 1 Reply
  3. Tom 13

    I was there once when a company had a malicious ntp source.

    Borked the whole network so fast you won't believe it. Whole damn network had to be rebuilt from scratch and the files restored from backup.

    For whatever reason, the internet service we'd been using to get the NTP from NIST went down. So the server went down it's list of authoritative services which had of course been left on the defaults. Again for whatever reason, each level wasn't authoritative until it reached the very last one that it had to accept. That source: the date for the firmware for the core switch. As the date was circa 2004 and the firmware was circa 1992... Yeah, bad thing happened.

    0 0 Reply
  4. J. R. Hartley

    Stephen Fry says...

    The Internet won't work without atomic clocks.

    0 1 Reply

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