What's left to doo on NTS

[Kurt Roeckx]

On Sun, Mar 03, 2019 at 10:25:31PM +0100, Achim Gratz via devel wrote:
> Kurt Roeckx via devel writes:
> > I don't see how it can work with the current pool system. You look
> > something up like pool.ntp.org and get some IP addresses. But none
> > of those will have a certificate for pool.ntp.org, so the
> > verification of the certificate will fail.
> 
> You will still look up a pool address, just for the NTS-KE of that pool,
> which will have a proper certificate by definition.  The NTS-KE will
> then give you back a different NTS server to use.  Since this server
> needs to agree on the master key and the initial set of cookies with the
> NTS-KE, if you can successfully communicate with the NTS, it is indeed
> the server that the NTS-KE has assigned to you.  No certificate for that
> server is needed.

There currently isn't a protocol defined between the NTP server
and the NTS-KE. This would mean that if you want to use it with
the pool that such a protocol would need to be defined. I also
don't think NTS is designed for this use case. I'm not sure what
the security implications are, but at least hacking the pool then
seems like a way to be able to impersonate all servers in the
pool.


Kurt