Announcing cfnts: Cloudflare's implementation of NTS in Rust
Oct 31, 2019Watson Ladd, Pop Chunhapanya, Gabbi Fisher
Summary
This post details Cloudflare's implementation of the Network Time Security (NTS) protocol in Rust, named 'cfnts'. It explains the NTS protocol's two stages (NTS-KE and NTPv4), the rationale for choosing Rust (memory safety, non-nullability, thread safety, immutability, error handling) over Go for performance-critical time synchronization, and the dependencies used (Mio, Rustls). It also highlights participation in IETF hackathons to ensure interoperability and the strategy of leveraging existing tools like chrony for clock adjustment while focusing on implementing the new secure time protocols.
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