• New Internet Architecture Board, IETF Trust, IETF LLC and Internet Engineering Task Force Leadership Announced

    Members of the incoming Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the IETF Trust, the IETF Administration LLC (IETF LLC) Board of Directors, and the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG)—which provides leadership for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)—have been officially announced, with new members selected by the 2021-2023 IETF Nominating Committee.

      13 Feb 2023

    • Informing the community on third-party correspondence regarding the W3C

      In accordance with our policy of transparency, this blog post is being published in order to keep the community informed about recent correspondence with lawyers acting on behalf of the Movement for an Open Web.

      • Lars EggertIETF Chair
      8 Feb 2023

    • Six Applied Networking Research Prizes Awarded for 2023

      Six network researchers have received Internet Research Task Force Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP), an award focused on recent results in applied networking research and on interesting new research of potential relevance to the Internet standards community.

      • Grant GrossIETF Blog Reporter
      9 Jan 2023

    • Travel grants allow Ph.D. students to participate at IETF meeting in-person

      Sergio Aguilar Romero and Martine Sophie Lenders, both Ph.D. students in technology fields, attended and participated in the IETF 115 meeting in London with assistance through travel grants from the Internet Research Task Force.

      • Grant GrossIETF Blog Reporter
      7 Jan 2023

    • Impressions from the Internet Architecture Board E-Impact Workshop

      The IAB ran an online workshop in December 2022 to begin to explore and understand the environmental impacts of the Internet. The discussion was active, and it will take time to summarise and produce the workshop report – but the topic is important, so we wanted to share some early impressions of the outcomes.

      • Colin PerkinsIAB Member
      • Jari ArkkoIAB Member
      6 Jan 2023
    • Show all

    Filter by topic and date

    Filter by topic and date

    Time to update the Network Time Protocol

    • Karen O'DonoghueNTP Working Group Chair
    • Dieter SieboldNTP Working Group Chair

    30 Sep 2022

    The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a foundational Internet standard that has provided clock synchronization between computer systems since the early 1980s. It was first standardized as RFC 958 in Sept 1984 with several revisions in the following years. Discussions have been ongoing in the NTP working group for a few years now about updating NTPv4 to NTPv5. This update is motivated by lessons learned, ongoing vulnerabilities, and emerging use cases.

    Big Ben

    While the NTP has been around since the early days of the Internet, work on the NTP has been ongoing in the working group (WG) since its formation in 2005. This includes the relatively recently published “Network Time Security for the Network Time Protocol” [RFC 8915]. At the moment, the working group is considering NTP version 5, as an update to the NTP version 4 [RFC 5905] published in 2010, to accommodate new and emerging use cases and networking environments. 

    The “NTPv5 use cases and requirements” Internet-Draft has been adopted by the NTP WG to help discuss the use cases, requirements, and considerations that should be factored in the design of a protocol to supersede NTP version 4. For example, the I-D describes differing situations, such as data centers where network latency or power are unlikely to be constraints, thus offering the potential for higher levels of accuracy and precision. Conversely, local networks and public internet connections  may introduce packet loss, delay, and filtering, but NTP may nonetheless be able to provide enough information for both basic time information and synchronization.

    Evolving existing standards to define new capabilities to take into account new use cases and a wider variety of networking environments is one of the strengths of the IETF, and we are looking forward to the discussion within the NTP working group. We also expect to gain a good deal of insight at the upcoming IETF Hackathon on 5-6 November, where we will develop and test preliminary implementations of NTPv5 to validate discussion from the working group. If you are interested in NTP and already planning to participate in IETF 115, we would welcome your participation. If you aren’t already planning to be at the IETF Hackathon or the IETF 115 meeting, there’s still time to register!

    Share this page