OpenNTPD

OpenNTPD (also known as OpenBSD NTP Daemon) is a Unix daemon implementing the Network Time Protocol to synchronize the local clock of a computer system with remote NTP servers. It is also able to act as an NTP server to NTP-compatible clients. OpenBSD NTP Daemon was initially developed by Alexander Guy and Henning Brauer as part of the OpenBSD project, with further help by many authors. Its design goals include being secure (non-exploitable), easy to configure, and accurate enough for most purposes. Its portable version, like that of OpenSSH, is developed as a child project which adds the portability code to the OpenBSD version and releases it separately. The portable version is developed by Brent Cook. The project developers receive some funding from the OpenBSD Foundation. The development of OpenNTPD was motivated by a combination of issues with current NTP daemons: difficult configuration, complicated and difficult to audit code, and unsuitable licensing. OpenNTPD was designed to solve these problems and make time synchronization accessible to a wider userbase. After a period of development, OpenNTPD first appeared in OpenBSD 3.6. Its first release was announced on 2 November 2004. OpenNTPD is an attempt by the OpenBSD team to produce an NTP daemon implementation that is secure, simple to audit, trivial to set up and administer, reasonably accurate, and light on system resources. As such, the design goals for OpenNTPD are: security, ease of use, and performance. Security in OpenNTPD is achieved by robust validity check in the network input path, use of bounded buffer operations via strlcpy, and privilege separation to mitigate the effects of possible security bugs exploiting the daemon through privilege escalation. In order to simplify the use of NTP, OpenNTPD implements a smaller set of functionalities than those available in other NTP daemons, such as that provided by the Network Time Protocol Project. The objective is to provide enough features to satisfy typical usage at the risk of unsuitability for esoteric or niche requirements.