Yes, NTPsec is real and I am involved

A couple of stories by Charles Babcock and (my coincidentally old friend) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols have mentioned the existence of an ‘NTPsec’ project being funded by the Core Infrastructure Initiative as an alternative and perhaps eventual replacement for the reference implementation of Network Time Protocol maintained by Harlan Stenn and the Network Time Foundation.

I confirm that NTPsec does exist, and that I am deeply involved in it.

The project has not yet officially released code, though you can view a preliminary web page at ntpsec.org. For various complicated political reasons a full public discussion of the project’s genesis and goals should wait until we go fully public. You probably won’t have to wait long for this.

I can, however, disclose several facts that I think will be of interest to readers of this blog…

NTPSec is a fork of the Mills implementation of NTP (which we think of as “NTP Classic”). Early major objectives include security hardening, removal of the pre-POSIX legacy cruft that presently makes NTP Classic hard to audit and maintain, and building a really good test suite so the suite can demonstrate its correctness.

I am deeply involved, and have been working hard on this project behind the scenes for about eight months (this in part accounts for the light blogging recently). I am the architecture/technology lead, and presently the most active coder. A&D regular Susan Sons (aka HedgeMage) is also on the team, and in fact recruited me onto it.

Some team members (including me) are being paid to work full-time on this project. More may be hired. For that to happen, more funding commitments have to land. And probably will land; we’re hearing a lot of clamor from industry for a better-maintained, more secure NTP and have been pressed to release somewhat sooner than I would prefer.

I do expect this to have some negative impact on the amount of time I spend on other projects. But one of the reasons I took the gig is that GPSD is now sufficiently mature and stable not to need large amounts of my time. And time service is really, really important.

There is enough technical work on this project to which I am near-ideally suited to keep it top of my list for a minimimum of 2.5 to 3 years. That’s even if I don’t end up designing the next generation NTP protocol, an outcome I now consider to have over 50% odds.

Those of you guessing that my recent work on improving and documenting time service for GPSD led into this project are of course correct. But there’s more to it than that; it turns out that NTP daemons have a remarkably large amount in common with gpsd. Both are network-aware device managers, with closely comparable KLOC scale and porting challenges. They share arcana like dealing with 1PPS signals, and quite a bit of specialized knowledge just maps right across.

Another aspect of my skills profile that fits me well for the project is knowledge of ancient pre-standardization Unix APIs acquired over four decades. NTP is as full of this stuff as GPSD used to be before I removed it all several years back, and one of the principal tasks is to remove the cruft from NTP in order to reduce code volume and attack surface. We have already ripped out approximately 17% (40KLOC) of the NTP Classic codebase.

Finally, let me note that this code is not really living up to its reputation for impenetrability. There’s a longstanding legend that only Dave Mills ever really understood the Byzantine time-synchronization algorithms at NTP’s heart, but I used to be a mathematician and I think I already get most of it outside of a few arcana about statistical filtering of noisy signals. And most of the code isn’t those Byzantine algorithms anyway, but rather the not terribly surprising plumbing around them. Modifying it is high-end systems programming and not for the faint of heart, to be sure, but it’s not a thesis research project.

I think any top-grade systems engineer with a solid background in applied math or physics could grok NTP, really. Either that or, as I joked on G+, I actually have “read ancient code” as a minor superpower. Which joke I report mainly because I think Dave Taht was much funnier when he figuratively raised a Spock-like eyebrow back at me and said “Minor?”