Tag Archives: reliable

NTP Appliance: Meinberg LANTIME & SyncFire

In case you’re responsible for an enterprise network or data center you should care about NTP. Refer to “Why should I run own NTP Servers?“. As a hobby technician you might first think about Raspberry Pis with self soldered GPS modules. Well, good idea to play with, but not reliable at all. Way to unstable, hard to update, no alerting, no service agreements, and so on.

Hence you should use a dedicated NTP appliance such as the Meinberg LANTIME NTP Time Servers. I am using a LANTIME M200 with a DCF77 correlation receiver in my lab. With this post I am showing how to set up this NTP server, giving some insights, and listing the advantages of such an appliance compared to a Raspberry Pi or any other DIY server approach. My wish list aka feature requests to this product round things up.

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Why should I run own NTP Servers?

… since we all can use “pool.ntp.org”? Easy answer: Many modern (security) techniques rely on accurate time. Certificate validation, two-factor authentication, backup auto-deletion, logs generation, and many more. Meanwhile, we use an unauthenticated protocol (via stateless UDP) from unauthenticated sources (NTP pool) to rely on! Really?

TL;DR: If you want to operate a secure environment you should use your own on-site stratum 1 NTP servers along with authentication. This is the only way to eliminate time spoofing attacks from the outside. Don’t reduce your overall security to a stateless and unauthenticated (read: easy-to-spoof) network protocol!

If you are using a couple of different NTP sources it might be not that easy for an attacker to spoof your time – though not unfeasible at all. And think about small routers with VPN endpoints and DNSSEC resolving enabled, or IoT devices such as cameras or door openers – they don’t even have a real-time clock with a battery inside. They fully rely on NTP.

This is what this blogpost series is all about. Let’s dig into it. ;)

Continue reading Why should I run own NTP Servers?