Realiser par : HESSACK RYAN STEEVE

KENGNE NICK
INTRODUCTION

Network Time protocol (NTP) synchronizes clocks of hosts and routers in

01 the internet

NIST estimates 10-20 million NTP severs and clients deployedin the
02 internetand its tributaries all over the world. Every Windows/Xp has an
NTP client

NTP provides nominal accuracies of low tens of milliseconds on WANs,

03 submilliseconds on LANs, and submicroseconds using a precision time
source such as a cesium oscillator or GPS receiver

04 NTP software has been ported to almost every workstation and server
platform available today - from PCs to Crays -Unix, Windows, CMS and
embedded systems, even home routers and battery backup systems.

05 The NTP architecture, protocol and algorithms have been evolvedover

the last two decades to the latest NTP version 4 software distribution
The Sun Never Sets on NTP

NTP is argueably the longest running, continuosly operating,

01 ubiquitously available protocol in the internet

❖ USNO and NIST, as well as equivalents in other countries, provide multiple NTP primary servers directly synchronized to
national standard cesium clock ensembles and GPS
❖ Over 230 internet primary servers are in Australia, Canada, Chike, Franxce, Germany, Israel, Italy, Holland, Japan, Norway,
sweden, switzerland, UK, and US

02 Well over a million Internet servers and clients are all over the world

❖ National and regional service providers BBN, MCI, Sprint, Alternet, etc
❖ Agencies and organizations: US Weather Service, US Treasury Service, IRS, PBS, Merril Lynch, Citicorp, GTE, Sun, DEC,
HP, etc
❖ Private networks are reported to have over 10,000 NTP servers and clients behind firewalls; one (GTE) reports in the order of
30,000 NTp workstations and PCs
❖ NTP has been on the NASA shuttle and in Antarctica and planned for the Mars Internet.
Needs for precision time

❖ Distributed database transaction journaling and logging

❖ Stock market buy and sell orders
❖ Secure document timestamps (with cryptographic certification)
❖ Aviation traffic control and position reporting
❖ Radio and TV programming launch and monitoring
❖ Intruder detection, location and reporting
❖ Multimedia synchronization for real-time teleconferencing
❖ Interactive simulation event synchronization and ordering
❖ Network monitoring, measurement and control
❖ Early detection of failing network infrastructure devices and air
conditioning equipment
❖ Differentiated services traffic engineering
❖ Distributed network gaming and training
NTP Clock Strata

❖ Stratum 0.- Composed by: Atomic Clocks, GPS Clocks.

❖ Stratum 1 - Primary
Time Servers.- Computers attached to stratum 0 devices
They act as servers for requests from Stratus 2
❖ Stratum 2
Computers sending NTP requests to Time Servers in Stratum 1
Computers in this level will reference to several time servers to
synchronize their clocks
S2 Computers will peer with another S2 computers to provide more
reliable and robust time for all devices in the peer group
They act as servers for requests from Stratus 3
❖ Stratum 3, 4,
Computers employ the same NTP function as in Stratum 2
Potentially up to 16 levels
NTP capsule summary

❖ Primary (stratum 1) servers synchronize to national time standards via

radio, satellite and modem.
❖ Secondary (stratum 2, ...) servers and clients synchronize to primary
servers via hierarchical subnet.
❖ Clients and servers operate in master/slave, symmetric and multicast
modes with or without cryptographic authentication.
❖ Reliability assured by redundant servers and diverse network paths.
❖ Engineered algorithms reduce jitter, mitigate multiple sources and
avoid improperly operating servers.
❖ The system clock is disciplined in time and frequency using an
adaptive algorithm responsive to network time jitter and clock
oscillator frequency wander.
NT P architec ture o ver view

❖ Multiple servers/peers provide redundancy and diversity.

❖ Clock filters select best from a window of eight time offset samples.
❖ Intersection and clustering algorithms pick best truechimers and
discard falsetickers.
❖ Combining algorithm computes weighted average of time offsets.
❖ Loop filter and variable frequency oscillator (VFO) implement hybrid
phase/frequency-lock (P/F) feedback loop to minimize jitter and
wander.
NT P Synchronization Subnet
Computer local clock are synchronized to a
01 number of Time Servers and peer computer

The set of these computers and Time

02 Servers is known as the Synchronization
Subnet

The Stratum Number for each computer is

03 determined by the hop count to the root

(Strata 0)
NT P subnet configurations

❖ Workstations use multicast mode with multiple department servers.

❖ Department servers use client/server modes with multiple campus
servers and symmetric modes with each other.
❖ Campus servers use client/server modes with up to six different
external primary servers and symmetric modes with each other and
external secondary servers.
G o a ls an d n o n -g o al s

Goals
01 ❖ Provide the best accuracy under prevailing network and server conditions.
❖ Resist many and varied kinds of failures, including two-face, fail-stop, malicious attacks and implementation bugs.
❖ Maximize utilization of Internet diversity and redundancy.
❖ Automatically organize subnet topology for best accuracy and reliability.
❖ Self contained cryptographic authentication based on both symmetric key and public key infrastructures and independent of
external services.

02 Non-goals

❖ Local time - this is provided by the operating system.

❖ Access control - this is provided by firewalls and address filtering.
❖ Privacy - all protocol values, including time values, are public.
❖ Non-repudiation - this can be provided by a layered protocol if necessary.
❖ Conversion of NP timestamps to and from other time representations and ormate
Evolution to NTP Version 4
Current Network Time Protocol Version 3 has been in use since 1992,
01 with nominal accuracy in the low milliseconds.

Modern workstations and networks are much faster today, with

02 attainable accuracy in the low microseconds.

NTP Version 4 architecture, protocol and algorithms have been evolved

03 to achieve this degree of accuracy.
❖ Improved clock models which accurately predict the time and
frequency adjustment for each synchronization source and network
path.
❖ Engineered algorithms reduce the impact of network jitter and
oscillator wander while speeding up initial convergence.
❖ Redesigned clock discipline algorithm operates in frequency-lock,
phase-lock and hybrid modes.

The improvements, confirmed by simulation, improve accuracy by

04 about a factor of ten, while allowing operation at much longer poll
intervals without significant reduction in accuracy.
NTP Version 4 autonomous system model
Fire-and-forget software
01 ❖ Single software distribution can be compiled and installed
automatically on most host architectures and operating systems
❖ Run-time configuration can be automatically determined and
maintained in response to changing network topology and server
availability.

Optional autonomous configuration (Autoconfigure)

03 ❖ Multicast survey nearby network environment to construct a list of
suitable servers.
❖ Select best servers from among the list using a defined metric.
❖ Reconfigure the subnet for best accuracy with overhead constraints.
❖ Periodically refresh the list in order to adapt to changing topology.

Optional autonomous authentication (Autokey)

04 ❖ For each new server found, fetch and verify its cryptographic
credentials.
❖ Authenticate each message received using engineered protocol.
❖ Regenerate keys in a timely manner to resist compromise.
A day in the life of a busy NTP server
❖ NTP primary (stratum 1) server rackety is a Sun IPC running SunOS
4.1.3 and supporting 734 clients scattered all over the world
❖ This machine supports NFS, NTP, RIP, IGMP and a mess of printers,
radio clocks and an 8-port serial multiplexor
❖ The mean input packet rate is 6.4 packets/second, which corresponds
to a mean poll interval of 157 seconds for each client
❖ Each input packet generates an average of 0.64 output packets and
requires a total of 2.4 ms of CPU time for the input/output transaction
❖ In total, the NTP service requires 1.54% of the available CPU time and
generates 10.5, 608-bit packets per second, or 0.41% of a T1 line
❖ The conclusion drawn is that even a slow machine can support
substantial numbers of clients with no significant degradation on other
network services
Reference clock sources (1997 survey)
In a survey of 36,479 peers, found 1,733 primary and backup external
01 reference sources

02 1,502 local clock backup sources (used only if all other sources fail)

03 231 radio/satellite/modem primary sources

❖ 47 GPS satellite (worldwide), GOES satellite (western hemisphere)
❖ 57 WWVB radio (US)
❖ 17 WWV radio (US)
❖ 63 DCF77 radio (Europe)
❖ 6 MSF radio (UK)
❖ 5 CHU radio (Canada)
❖ 7 modem time service (NIST and USNO (US), PT (Germany), NPL (UK))
❖ 25 other (precision PPS sources, etc.)

For some reason or other, 88 of the 1,733 sources appeared down at

04 the time of the survey
Timekeeping facilities at UDeI

❖ Cesium oscillators are calibrated by U.S. Naval Observatory and

checked continuously by Northeast US LORAN-C chain and GPS
❖ NTP primary time servers synchronize to ASCII, PPS and IRIG-B, all
with kernel modifications for precision timekeeping
❖ NTP secondary servers (not shown) include SunOS 4/5. Ultrix 4 OSF/1.
HP-UX. Cisco, Bancomm and Fuzzball (semi-retired)
Briefing roadmap on NTP technology and performance

❖ NTP project page http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html/.

❖ Network Time Protocol (NTP) General Overview
NTP Architecture, Protocol and Algorithms
NP Procedure Descriptions and Flow Diagrams
❖ NTP Security Model
NP Cryptographic Authentication (Autokey)
NP Security Algorithms
❖ NTP Clock Discipline Principles
❖ NTP Precision Synchronization
❖ NTP Performance Analysis
❖ NTP Algorithm Analysis
❖ Long-range Dependency Effects in TP Timekeeping
NTP Modes of Operation

Multicast
01 ❖
❖
❖
For high speed networks
High Accuracies are not required
Time Servers send periodic NP broadcasts
❖ Determine the time based on an assumed delay
❖ Time servers provides synchronization, but do not accept NTP messages from clients

Procedure-Call
02 ❖
❖
❖
Intended for file servers or workstations that require high evels of accuracy
A Time Server acting as a client send a request to a peer operating as a server
Server after inserting timestamps and recalculating the Checksum, sends back the message
❖ A server operating as a client can be synchronized, but cannot provide synchronization
❖ A server operating as a server can provide synchronization, but cannot be synchronized

Symmetric
03 ❖ A server can provide synchronization or to be synchronized
❖ Two modes of operation:
• Active Mode: For servers in the high levels of the stratum (near the leaves)
Passive Mode: For servers in the low levels of thestratum (near the root)
NTP onl ine resources a t www.n tp .org

❖ Network Time Protocol (NTP) Version 3 Specification RFC-1305

NTPv4 features documented in release notes and reports cited
elsewhere
❖ Simple NTP (SNTP) Version 4 specification RFC-2030
Applicable to IPV4, IPv6 and ISO CNLS
❖ List of public NTP time servers (as of July 2004)
128 active primary (stratum 1) servers
178 active stratum 2 servers
❖ NP Version 4 software and documentation
Ported to over two dozen architectures and operating systems
Utility programs for remote monitoring, control and performance
evaluation
Complete documentation in HTML format
❖ NTP project page
Briefings, web pages, technical information
Futher information

❖ TP home page http://www.ntp.org

Current NTP Version 3 and 4 software and documentation
FAQ and links to other sources and interesting places
❖ David L. Mills home page http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills
Papers, reports and memoranda in PostScript and PDF formats
Briefings in HTML, PostScript, PowerPoint and PDF formats
Collaboration resources hardware, software and documentation
Songs, photo galleries and after-dinner speech scripts
❖ Udel FTP server: ftp://ftp.udel.edu/pub/ntp
Current TP Version software, documentation and support
Collaboration resources and junkbox
❖ Related projects http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/status.htm
Current research project descriptions and briefings