Tag Archives: Cookie

Network Time Security – Strengths & Weaknesses

This is a guest blogpost by Martin Langer, Ph.D. student for “Secured Time Synchronization Using Packet-Based Time Protocols” at Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Germany.


The Network Time Security protocol (NTS) is close to completion as an Internet standard and will replace the existing security mechanisms in NTP. The introductory article on NTS describes the basic communication process as well as the most important features. Despite high-security efforts, NTS also has its limitations. In this blogpost, I list the strengths and weaknesses of the new authentication mechanism and describe them briefly.

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Network Time Security – New NTP Authentication Mechanism

This is a guest blogpost by Martin Langer, Ph.D. student for “Secured Time Synchronization Using Packet-Based Time Protocols” at Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Germany.


In many areas, the use of authentication mechanisms in NTP is important to prevent the manipulation of time information by an attacker. For many years, NTP has been offering solutions such as a Symmetric Key based method and the Autokey approach. However, both have serious disadvantages, for which reason they are rarely used to secure NTP connections. After years of development, a new standard is to be adopted in 2020 that solves the problems of the current mechanisms and offers a real alternative. First implementations of the so-called Network Time Security protocol (NTS) are already available and interoperate with each other …

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DNS Capture: UDP, TCP, IP-Fragmentation, EDNS, ECS, Cookie

It’s not always this simple DNS thing such as “single query – single answer, both via UDP”. Sometimes you have some more options or bigger messages that look and behave differently on the network. For example: IP fragmentation for larger DNS answers that do not fit into a single UDP datagram (hopefully not after the DNS flag day 2020 anymore), or DNS via TCP, or some newer options within the EDNS space such as “EDNS Client Subnet” (ECS) or DNS cookies.

I won’t explain any details about those options, but I am publishing a pcap with that kind of packets along with some Wireshark screenshots. Feel free to dig into it.

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