Re: Network time protocol

[Frank BENNETT <bennett@example.com>]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 02:07:39PM -0500, s-luppescu@example.com wrote:

> Here's what I was told, when I asked about the safety of opening up a port on
> my firewall to permit ntp:
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>         Theorically there is a problem when opening the NTP server. Many
> of the cryptographic systems use the system time to generate random
> numbers, and if 'attackers' can have access to your exactly system time,
> they theorically can break your cryptographic messages, etc. I recomment
> to close this to the internet, but if you don't run any PGP/GPG/SSL big
> programs or/and don't have big concern about your cryptography, it's okay
> to leave it open.

Wow again.  Reminds me of what Chuck Yaeger said about the ejection seat in
test aircraft: "A way of committing suicide to keep from getting killed." I
wonder what folks do about this.

I remember seeing a note recently about using some facility other than the
time for the entropy pool in encryption on Linux systems.  Maybe this is
only a concern if your particular setup draws on the time.

?

Frank Bennett
Nagoya