Network Time Protocol

Description

The Network Time Protocol is used to manage the system clock over a network. Computer clocks are not very accurate, so time will drift unpredictably on unmanaged systems. Central time protocols can be used both to ensure that time is consistent among a network of systems, and that their time is consistent with the outside world.

If every system on a network reliably reports the same time, then it is much easier to correlate log messages in case of an attack. In addition, a number of cryptographic protocols (such as Kerberos) use timestamps to prevent certain types of attacks. If your network does not have synchronized time, these protocols may be unreliable or even unusable.

Depending on the specifics of the network, global time accuracy may be just as important as local synchronization, or not very important at all. If your network is connected to the Internet, using a public timeserver (or one provided by your enterprise) provides globally accurate timestamps which may be essential in investigating or responding to an attack which originated outside of your network.

A typical network setup involves a small number of internal systems operating as NTP servers, and the remainder obtaining time information from those internal servers.

There is a choice between the daemons ntpd and chronyd, which are available from the repositories in the ntp and chrony packages respectively.

The default chronyd daemon can work well when external time references are only intermittently accesible, can perform well even when the network is congested for longer periods of time, can usually synchronize the clock faster and with better time accuracy, and quickly adapts to sudden changes in the rate of the clock, for example, due to changes in the temperature of the crystal oscillator. Chronyd should be considered for all systems which are frequently suspended or otherwise intermittently disconnected and reconnected to a network. Mobile and virtual systems for example.

The ntpd NTP daemon fully supports NTP protocol version 4 (RFC 5905), including broadcast, multicast, manycast clients and servers, and the orphan mode. It also supports extra authentication schemes based on public-key cryptography (RFC 5906). The NTP daemon (ntpd) should be considered for systems which are normally kept permanently on. Systems which are required to use broadcast or multicast IP, or to perform authentication of packets with the Autokey protocol, should consider using ntpd.

Refer to https://wiki.debian.org/NTP for more detailed comparison of features of chronyd and ntpd daemon features respectively, and for further guidance how to choose between the two NTP daemons.

The upstream manual pages at https://chrony-project.org/documentation.html for chronyd and http://www.ntp.org for ntpd provide additional information on the capabilities and configuration of each of the NTP daemons.