Don't update NTP – stop using it

Update: This blogpost was written before NTS was available, and the information is outdated. If you are looking for a modern solution, I recommend using software and a time server with Network Time Security, as specified in RFC 8915.

tl;dr Several severe vulnerabilities have been found in the time setting software NTP. The Network Time Protocol is not secure anyway due to the lack of a secure authentication mechanism. Better use tlsdate.

Today several severe vulnerabilities in the NTP software were published. On Linux and other Unix systems running the NTP daemon is widespread, so this will likely cause some havoc. I wanted to take this opportunity to argue that I think that NTP has to die.

In the old times before we had the Internet our computers already had an internal clock. It was just up to us to make sure it shows the correct time. These days we have something much more convenient – and less secure. We can set our clocks through the Internet from time servers. This is usually done with NTP.

NTP is pretty old, it was developed in the 80s, Wikipedia says it's one of the oldest Internet protocols in use. The standard NTP protocol has no cryptography (that wasn't really common in the 80s). Anyone can tamper with your NTP requests and send you a wrong time. Is this a problem? It turns out it is. Modern TLS connections increasingly rely on the system time as a part of security concepts. This includes certificate expiration, OCSP revocation checks, HSTS and HPKP. All of these have security considerations that in one way or another expect the time of your system to be correct.

Practical attack against HSTS on Ubuntu

At the Black Hat Europe conference last October in Amsterdam there was a talk presenting a pretty neat attack against HSTS (the background paper is here, unfortunately there seems to be no video of the talk). HSTS is a protocol to prevent so-called SSL-Stripping-Attacks. What does that mean? In many cases a user goes to a web page without specifying the protocol, e. g. he might just type www.example.com in his browser or follow a link from another unencrypted page. To avoid attacks here a web page can signal the browser that it wants to be accessed exclusively through HTTPS for a defined amount of time. TLS security is just an example here, there are probably other security mechanisms that in some way rely on time.

Here's the catch: The defined amount of time depends on a correct time source. On some systems manipulating the time is as easy as running a man in the middle attack on NTP. At the Black Hat talk a live attack against an Ubuntu system was presented. He also published his NTP-MitM-tool called Delorean. Some systems don't allow arbitrary time jumps, so there the attack is not that easy. But the bottom line is: The system time can be important for application security, so it needs to be secure. NTP is not.

Now there is an authenticated version of NTP. It is rarely used, but there's another catch: It has been shown to be insecure and nobody has bothered to fix it yet. There is a pre-shared-key mode that is not completely insecure, but that is not really practical for widespread use. So authenticated NTP won't rescue us. The latest versions of Chrome shows warnings in some situations when a highly implausible time is detected. That's a good move, but it's not a replacement for a secure system time.

There is another problem with NTP and that's the fact that it's using UDP. It can be abused for reflection attacks. UDP has no way of checking that the sender address of a network package is the real sender. Therefore one can abuse UDP services to amplify Denial-of-Service-attacks if there are commands that have a larger reply. It was found that NTP has such a command called monlist that has a large amplification factor and it was widely enabled until recently. Amplification is also a big problem for DNS servers, but that's another toppic.

tlsdate can improve security

While there is no secure dedicated time setting protocol, there is an alternative: TLS. A TLS packet contains a timestamp and that can be used to set your system time. This is kind of a hack. You're taking another protocol that happens to contain information about the time. But it works very well, there's a tool called tlsdate together with a timesetting daemon tlsdated written by Jacob Appelbaum.

There are some potential problems to consider with tlsdate, but none of them is even closely as serious as the problems of NTP. Adam Langley mentions here that using TLS for time setting and verifying the TLS certificate with the current system time is a circularity. However this isn't a problem if the existing system time is at least remotely close to the real time. If using tlsdate gets widespread and people add random servers as their time source strange things may happen. Just imagine server operator A thinks server B is a good time source and server operator B thinks server A is a good time source. Unlikely, but could be a problem. tlsdate defaults to the PTB (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt) as its default time source, that's an organization running atomic clocks in Germany. I hope they set their server time from the atomic clocks, then everything is fine. Also an issue is that you're delegating your trust to a server operator. Depending on what your attack scenario is that might be a problem. However it is a huge improvement trusting one time source compared to having a completely insecure time source.

So the conclusion is obvious: NTP is insecure, you shouldn't use it. You should use tlsdate instead. Operating systems should replace ntpd or other NTP-based solutions with tlsdated (ChromeOS already does).

(I should point out that the authentication problems have nothing to do with the current vulnerabilities. These are buffer overflows and this can happen in every piece of software. Tlsdate seems pretty secure, it uses seccomp to make exploitability harder. But of course tlsdate can have security vulnerabilities, too.)

Update: Accuracy and TLS 1.3

This blog entry got much more publicity than I expected, I'd like to add a few comments on some feedback I got.

A number of people mentioned the lack of accuracy provided by tlsdate. The TLS timestamp is in seconds, adding some network latency you'll get a worst case inaccuracy of around 1 second, certainly less than two seconds. I can see that this is a problem for some special cases, however it's probably safe to say that for most average use cases an inaccuracy of less than two seconds does not matter. I'd prefer if we had a protocol that is both safe and as accurate as possible, but we don't. I think choosing the secure one is the better default choice.

Then some people pointed out that the timestamp of TLS will likely be removed in TLS 1.3. From a TLS perspective this makes sense. There are already TLS users that randomize the timestamp to avoid leaking the system time (e. g. tor). One of the biggest problems in TLS is that it is too complex so I think every change to remove unneccesary data is good.
For tlsdate this means very little in the short term. We're still struggling to get people to start using TLS 1.2. It will take a very long time until we can fully switch to TLS 1.3 (which will still take some time till it's ready). So for at least a couple of years tlsdate can be used with TLS 1.2.

I think both are valid points and they show that in the long term a better protocol would be desirable. Something like NTP, but with secure authentication. It should be possible to get both: Accuracy and security. With existing protocols and software we can only have either of these - and as said, I'd choose security by default.

I finally wanted to mention that the Linux Foundation is sponsoring some work to create a better NTP implementation and some code was just published. However it seems right now adding authentication to the NTP protocol is not part of their plans.

Update 2:

OpenBSD just came up with a pretty nice solution that combines the security of HTTPS and the accuracy of NTP by using an HTTPS connection to define boundaries for NTP timesetting.