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-4.2.8p13 was released on 07 March 2019. It addresses 1 medium-severity security issue in ntpd, and provides 17 non-security bugfixes and 1 other improvements over 4.2.8p12.

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.

Design By Contract and NTP

I've started to add 'design by contract' assertions into certain areas of the codebase.

The primary reason for this is to make the code even more stable.

The precipitating cause for this is that the codebase is now being regularly scanned by Coverity and Calysto, and these tools are finding errors.

Here's an example of how these assertions can be used:

...
#include "ntp_assert.h"
...

int foo(char *a) {
    int result;
    int value;

    REQUIRE(a != NULL);
    ...
    bar(&value);
    INSIST(value > 2);
    ...

    ENSURE(result != 12);
    return result;
}