When a server/peer was specified with a key number to enable
authentication with a symmetric key, packets received from the
server/peer were accepted if they were authenticated with any of
the keys contained in the key file and not just the specified key.
This allowed an attacker who knew one key of a client/peer to modify
packets from its servers/peers that were authenticated with other
keys in a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. For example, in a network
where each NTP association had a separate key and all hosts had only
keys they needed, a client of a server could not attack other clients
of the server, but it could attack the server and also attack its own
clients (i.e. modify packets from other servers).
To not allow the server/peer to be authenticated with other keys
extend the authentication test to check if the key ID in the received
packet is equal to the configured key number. As a consequence, it's
no longer possible to authenticate two peers to each other with two
different keys, both peers have to be configured to use the same key.
This issue was discovered by Matt Street of Cisco ASIG.
Enable the PRV_Name2IPAddress() function with seccomp support and start
the helper process before loading the seccomp filter (but after dropping
root privileges). This will move the getaddrinfo() call outside the
seccomp filter and should make it more reliable as the list of required
system calls won't depend on what glibc NSS modules are used on the
system.
Require that at least one of the sources specified with this option is
selectable (i.e. recently reachable and not a falseticker) before
updating the clock. Together with the trust option this may be useful to
allow a trusted, but not very precise, reference clock or a trusted
authenticated NTP source to be safely combined with unauthenticated NTP
sources in order to improve the accuracy of the clock. They can be
selected and used for synchronization only if they agree with the
trusted and required source.
Assume time from a source that is specified with the trust option is
always true. It can't be rejected as falseticker in the source
selection if sources that are specified without this option don't agree
with it.
When the rtcsync directive is specified in the chronyd config file,
chronyd will update the RTC via settimeofday() every 60 minutes if
the system time is synchronised to NTP.
This simplifies the code and allows older records to be reused when no
more memory can be allocated for new addresses. Each slot of the hash
table has 16 records and there is no chaining between different slots.
Reused records may be newer than records in other slots, but the search
time remains constant.
This is useful on computers that have an RTC, but there is no battery to
keep the time when they are turned off and start with the same time on
each boot.
Since the NTPv4 update, the detection of synchronization loops based on
the refid prevents a server to initialize its clock from its clients
after restart. Remove that part from the recommended configuration.
Also, mention the time smoothing feature.
The Linux secure computing (seccomp) facility allows a process to
install a filter in the kernel that will allow only specific system
calls to be made. The process is killed when trying to make other system
calls. This is useful to reduce the kernel attack surface and possibly
prevent kernel exploits when the process is compromised.
Use the libseccomp library to add rules and load the filter into the
kernel. Keep a list of system calls that are always allowed after
chronyd is initialized. Restrict arguments that may be passed to the
socket(), setsockopt(), fcntl(), and ioctl() system calls. Arguments
to socketcall(), which is used on some architectures as a multiplexer
instead of separate socket system calls, are not restricted for now.
The mailonchange directive is not allowed as it calls sendmail.
Calls made by the libraries that chronyd is using have to be covered
too. It's difficult to determine which system calls they need as it may
change after an upgrade and it may depend on their configuration (e.g.
resolver in libc). There are also differences between architectures. It
can all break very easily and is therefore disabled by default. It can
be enabled with the new -F option.
This is based on a patch from Andrew Griffiths <agriffit@redhat.com>.
Adds option -P to chronyd on MacOS X which can be used to enable the
thread time constraint scheduling policy. This near real-time scheduling
policy removes a 1usec bias from the 'System time' offset.
Add maxdistance directive to set the maximum root distance the sources
are allowed to have to be selected. This is useful to reject NTPv4
sources that are no longer synchronized and report large dispersion.
The default value is 3 seconds.
Allow multiple hostnames/addresses separated by comma to be specified
with the -h option. Hostnames are resolved to up to 16 addresses. When
connecting to an address fails or no reply is received, try the next
address in the list.
Set the default value for the -h option to 127.0.0.1,::1.
Don't install chrony.txt in make install to avoid dependency on makeinfo
since chrony.texi is prepared by configure to set the default paths in
the documentation.
Sources that are not specified as a pool and have a name (i.e. not
specified by an IP address or added from chronyc) will be replaced with
a newly resolved address of the name when they become unreachable or
falseticker too.
