Ragnar,
Ragnar,
Steven Sommars said:
The secure time transfer of NTS was designed to avoid
amplification attacks.
Uh, no.
Yes, it was.
As Steven said, “The secure time transfer of NTS was designed to
avoid amplification attacks”. I would even say - to make it
impossible to use for amplification attacks.
Please tell me how. I've been part of this specific topic since the
original NTS spec. For what y'all are saying to be true, there are some
underlying assumptions that would need to be in place, and they are
clearly not in place now and won't be until people update their
software, and even better, tweak their configs.
The NTS protected NTP request is always of the same size, or in some
cases larger, than the NTS protected NTP response. It is carefully
designed to work that way.
So what?
The use of NTS is completely independent of whether or not a server will
respond to a packet.
And an unauthenticated NTP request that generates an unauthenticated
response is *always* smaller than an authenticated request, regardless
of whether or not the server responds.
Claiming that amplification is a significant issue in the case where
there's no amplification but the base packet size is bigger is ignoring
a key piece of information, and is disingenuous in my book.
You are now comparing unauthenticated mode 3 and mode 4 packets to
cryptographically secured ones, which is a completely different thing.
Disingenuous?
I made no such claim.
I was talking about:
As Steven said, “The secure time transfer of NTS was designed to
avoid amplification attacks”. I would even say - to make it
impossible to use for amplification attacks.
and that statement is not as clear as it could be. Specifically:
NTS was designed to avoid amplification attacks
is vague.
You have just now written:
You are now comparing unauthenticated mode 3 and mode 4 packets to
cryptographically secured ones, which is a completely different thing.
Completely different? How?
Where is the amplification in an unauthenticated mode 3 request and an
unauthenticated response?
How does cryptographically securing these packets make any difference here?
A protocol with varying packet size, as the NTS protected NTP is,
can easily have the bad property of having responses larger than the
requests if not taken care. Don’t you see that?
I sure think I understand these points.
Who here has said that there was any problem with there being an
amplification issue with properly-authenticated NTS packets?
The current NTS spec is *only* written for mode 3/4 exchanges. While it
might be applicable for mode 6/7, I haven't seen any specs for this
usage. In the NTP Project's Reference implementation there are extra
implementation-specific protections built in to mode 6/7 exchanges.
While some of this might be addressed in the NTS spec, I don't recall
ever seeing this.
So why are you talking about mode 6/7 in this context?
Hence, [what Steven said].
If you understand what's going on from the perspective of both the
client and the server and think about the various cases, I think you'll
see what I mean.
Hopefully, no-one exposes mode 6 or mode 7 on the internet anymore
at least not unauthenticated, and at least not the commands that are
not safe from amplification attacks. Those just can not be allowed
to be used anonymously.
But mode 6/7 is completely independent of NTS.
Exactly. No one needs to, or should, expose mode6/7 at all. They were
designed at a time when the internet was thought to be nice place were
people behaved, decades ago, today they are just huge pains in the
rear. Sadly allowing anonymous mode 6/7 was left in there far to long
(admittedly being wise in hindsight is so much easier than in advance).
And here we are, with UDP port 123 still being abused by the bad
guys, and still being filtered by the networks.
Your statement about "exposing" is imprecise and bordering on incorrect,
at least in some cases.
Exposing to the Internet, or anyone but the system owner.
I think you're in the right ballpark, but the edges of your boundaries
are a bit off.
I just can’t imagine that you didn’t fully understand that.
I think I have a pretty wide and deep understanding of these issues.
If I'm correct, then perhaps we are simply communicating imprecisely.
If I'm missing something, I'd like to know what it is.
But again, the use of mode 6/7 is completely independent of NTS. You
are trying to tie them together.
I am certainly not, and I think that should be perfectly clear from
the above.
I took my lead from the exchanges above.
Mode 6/7 packets should generally never be exposed outside localhost,
and should probably be replaced by something entirely different.
My initial inclination is to disagree with you first clause. Then I
noticed you used the word "generally" and perhaps we agree and have
different ways of expressing ourselves.
As for your second clause, yes, that might be a good solution. But
there's still a staggering number of v3 systems out there.
Simply creating a new mechanism and believing it will fix the problem
seems naive to me. But I also think incremental and appropriate use of
BCP 38, especially at the connection with the customer, is a good and
workable idea. I say this arrogantly, as I'm not in the business of
providing network access to entities.
They are just a extremely troublesome relics from a time long ago,
and they should have been removed from anonymous exposure on the
Internet twenty years ago at least.
Don’t you understand that?
If you don't, you are part of the problem of killing UDP port 123,
not part of the solution for saving it.
I think we're talking past each other.
It's disingenuous for people to imply otherwise.
I couldn’t say, I don’t even know of an example of someone who does.
You've done it in two cases here, from everything I have seen.
I have not. End of story.
Ragnar
I think we're talking past each other.