Heads up: incompatible NTS change, Monday midnight, UTC

[Hal Murray]

One of the last changes to the draft NTS RFC was to change the string constant 
used to make the keys that are used to encrypt and authenticate the NTP+NTS 
traffic.

There isn't any easy way to make a backwards compatible update.

The symptoms of incompatible versions are that the NTS-KE step will appear to 
work but the client and server will be using different keys so the NTP+NTS 
traffic won't work.  The client will use up all 8 cookies then start over with 
another NTS-KE step.

Old cookies will continue to work until you restart the client and it gets new 
cookies.  I expect to be able to restart the server with nothing worse than 
dropping a packet or two.

The Cloudflare servers were updated a while ago.  (This is why they aren't 
working if you are using NTS.)

Miroslav Lichvar (chrony) and I are planning to ship updated code and restart 
servers roughly Monday midnight, UTC.  (Late afternoon, Pacific time.)  I'll 
send another message when I've pushed the button.

That's a rough time estimate.

Christer Weinigel (Sweeden) will update his servers too, but I'm not sure when.


-- 
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