[time-nuts] can of worms: time-of-day in a community radio station

[Fiorenzo Cattaneo]

> This is a pretty baseless fear. The servers in the ntp pool
> are constantly monitored and those that are off by more than 100ms
> are quickly removed (within 2-3 hours, IIRC).

In computer security it's a big no-no to use unknown or untrusted
sources of information, as simple as that. A random source of
information is both untrusted and unknown. You would never see a data
center using ntp pool servers, or at least I haven't see any. Back in
the days we actually set up agreements with selected NTP sources to
give us authenticated NTP traffic. Of course the key management tends
to be a substantial amount of overhead, so in every data center where
we actually had access to the sky we installed stratum-1 gps rubidium
servers and called it a day.

Then of course there is also the argument as to whether the monitoring
code is robust enough, and whether it uses a known trusted authority
for time, or at least one which is not easily spoofed or hacked.

-- Fio Cattaneo

Universal AC, can Entropy be reversed? -- "THERE IS AS YET
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."

On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 8:00 AM Attila Kinali <attila at kinali.ch> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 19 Oct 2019 18:24:57 -0700
> Fiorenzo Cattaneo <fio at cattaneo.us> wrote:
>
> > The main reason I do not trust "pool" servers is because there is no
> > guarantee of which server you will get. I might be paranoid, but I am
> > worried about rogue servers, and I much rather trust well known public
> > stratum-1 NTP servers.
>
> This is a pretty baseless fear. The servers in the ntp pool
> are constantly monitored and those that are off by more than 100ms
> are quickly removed (within 2-3 hours, IIRC). Of course, if you
> are already using one of those, then the removal will not help you.
> But you are most likely using 3-5 servers anyways, which means ntp
> will remove the "rouge" server on its own.
>
>                         Attila Kinali
>
> --
> <JaberWorky>    The bad part of Zurich is where the degenerates
>                 throw DARK chocolate at you.
>
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