Everything You Need to Know about Network Time Security

This article was first published on NetNod’s Blog. It is reposted here with permission of the author.

A lot of the Internet’s most important security tools are dependent on accurate time. But until recently there was no way to ensure that the time you were getting came from a trusted source. The new Network Time Security (NTS) standard has been designed to fix that. In this post, we will summarise the most important NTS developments and link to a range of recent Netnod articles providing more information on the background, the NTS standard and the latest implementations.

What is NTS and why is it important?

NTS is an essential development of the Network Time Protocol (NTP). It has been developed within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and adds a much needed layer of security to a protocol that is more than 30 years old and is vulnerable to certain types of attack. Netnod has played an important role in the development of Network Time Security (NTS) from the standardization effort in the IETF to the development of several implementations and the launch of one of the first NTS-enabled NTP services in the world.

NTS consists of two protocols, Continue reading