Subject: [Ntp] I-D Action: draft-ietf-ntp-data-minimization-02.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2018 20:14:29 -0700

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
This draft is a work item of the Network Time Protocol WG of the IETF.

        Title           : NTP Client Data Minimization
        Authors         : Daniel Fox Franke
                          Aanchal Malhotra
	Filename        : draft-ietf-ntp-data-minimization-02.txt
	Pages           : 6
	Date            : 2018-07-01

Abstract:
   This memo proposes backward-compatible updates to the Network Time
   Protocol to strip unnecessary identifying information from client
   requests and to improve resilience against blind spoofing of
   unauthenticated server responses.

The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ntp-data-minimization/

There are also htmlized versions available at:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-ntp-data-minimization-02
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ntp-data-minimization-02

A diff from the previous version is available at:
https://www.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url2=draft-ietf-ntp-data-minimization-02

Please note that it may take a couple of minutes from the time of submission
until the htmlized version and diff are available at tools.ietf.org.

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

---

From: Miroslav Lichvar <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2018 17:55:07 +0200

> 	Filename        : draft-ietf-ntp-data-minimization-02.txt

I think the Acknowledgements in the draft might need to be fixed to
give the credit to the right person.

There are basically two separate ideas described in the draft. One is
that most fields in a client request can be set to zero. That was
described in RFC 2030. In SNTP Client Operations there is:

	For this purpose, all of the NTP header fields shown above can
	be set to 0, except the first octet and (optional) Transmit
	Timestamp fields.

The other idea is to randomize all bits of the transmit timestamp. It
seems that was implemented for the first time in rdate in OpenBSD by
Alexander Guy [1]. The SNTP client in rdate is based on the original
sntp code written by N.M. Maclaren and openntpd is based on the rdate
code [2].

If there are some important facts that I missed, please let me know.

[1] https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/1346900e6d0ac3aeb0e3f9eb60b94c66586978c6
[2] https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/9096d664ee8c58ed7da2c4e933461fdef51fe572

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar