NTP users are strongly urged to take immediate action to ensure that their NTP daemons are not susceptible to being used in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Please also take this opportunity to defeat denial-of-service attacks by implementing Ingress and Egress filtering through BCP38.

ntp-4.2.8p15 was released on 23 June 2020. It addresses 1 medium-severity security issue in ntpd, and provides 13 non-security bugfixes over 4.2.8p13.

Please see the NTP Security Notice for vulnerability and mitigation details.

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Are you using Autokey in production? If so, please contact Harlan - he's got some questions for you.

Logging and Debugging API Overhaul (GSoC 2010)

• Student: SunilTej
• Mentors: DaveHart, HarlanStenn
• GSoC: GSoC Project Page

Summary

Redesigning NTP's logging/debugging system will improve ntpd's logging and diagnostic capabilities. It will also give better control over logging/debugging.

A consistent logging interface for NTP and its projects would simplify its codebase and would make it more consistent. It also would benefit other NTP projects like SNTP by giving it acesss to its logging/debugging interface.

All in all it would benefit both developers and users by unifying logging/debugging interfaces under a improved system.

A big part of this project besides coding is designing and planning the improved logging/debugging system as well as coordinating the work necessary to implement these changes.

Related Items:

Design:

The basic idea is to have a log record which acts as a repository for the log of all the events.Formatting header is employed to retrieve a particular log from the log record and convert it into the human-readable form.This formatted output is directed to the console or a particular file.

Filtering is the key header file which screens the log messages based on the level set in the config by the user.There are five levels for logging defined namely debug<info<warning<error<critical.Depending on the required level the messages are logged.The basic rule is that a log request of level p is enabled when selected level q,is such that p>=q.This means if info is the selected level of logging,any messages from the level warning/error/critical are seen except debug.

Timeline

Date	Task	Description	% Done
7 Jun-15 Jun	coding ntplog()	developed the function ntplog() and starting to modify NLOG()
9 Aug	Wrap-up	Suggested 'pencils down' date. Take a week to scrub code, write tests, improve documentation, etc
12 Jul-16 Jul	Mid-term evaluations	Submit codes for mid-term evaluation
15 Jun-13 Jul	Logging System Design and implementation	worked on designing the logging system and implementing it
16 Aug-20 Aug	Final Evaluations	Submit codes for final evaluations
24 Apr-24 May	Community Bonding	Spent time to familiarize with the source,read documentation and understood the logging/debugging system currently available
25 May-30 May	DPRINTF,NLOG,msyslog	tested and tried to understand how the functions work.Tried tracing back log messages by running ntpd in -D2 and -D4
30 May-6 Jun	loopstats,peerstats,ntplog design	Learnt loopstats,peerstats from an illustrated graph.Tried to make an intial design of the ntplog() function which is an unification of NLOG,DPRINTF and msyslog
30 Aug	Code Submission	Submission of code samples to Google
100426		Accepted student proposals announced on the Google Summer of Code 2010 site.

Discussion and Comments