path: root/NEWS

---
NTP 4.2.8 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2014/12/18) 
 
Focus: Security and Bug fixes, enhancements.
 
Severity: HIGH
 
In addition to bug fixes and enhancements, this release fixes the
following high-severity vulnerabilities:

* Weak default key in config_auth().

  References: [Sec 2665] / CVE-2014-9293 / VU#852879
  CVSS: (AV:N/AC:L/Au:M/C:P/I:P/A:C) Base Score: 7.3
  Vulnerable Versions: all releases prior to 4.2.7p11
  Date Resolved: 28 Jan 2010

  Summary: If no 'auth' key is set in the configuration file, ntpd
	would generate a random key on the fly.  There were two
	problems with this: 1) the generated key was 31 bits in size,
	and 2) it used the (now weak) ntp_random() function, which was
	seeded with a 32-bit value and could only provide 32 bits of
	entropy.  This was sufficient back in the late 1990s when the
	code was written.  Not today.

  Mitigation: Upgrade to 4.2.7p11 or later.

  Credit: This vulnerability was noticed in ntp-4.2.6 by Neel Mehta
  	of the Google Security Team.

* Non-cryptographic random number generator with weak seed used by
  ntp-keygen to generate symmetric keys.

  References: [Sec 2666] / CVE-2014-9294 / VU#852879
  CVSS: (AV:N/AC:L/Au:M/C:P/I:P/A:C) Base Score: 7.3
  Vulnerable Versions: All NTP4 releases before 4.2.7p230
  Date Resolved: Dev (4.2.7p230) 01 Nov 2011

  Summary: Prior to ntp-4.2.7p230 ntp-keygen used a weak seed to
  	prepare a random number generator that was of good quality back
	in the late 1990s. The random numbers produced was then used to
	generate symmetric keys. In ntp-4.2.8 we use a current-technology
	cryptographic random number generator, either RAND_bytes from
	OpenSSL, or arc4random(). 

  Mitigation: Upgrade to 4.2.7p230 or later.

  Credit:  This vulnerability was discovered in ntp-4.2.6 by
  	Stephen Roettger of the Google Security Team.

* Buffer overflow in crypto_recv()

  References: Sec 2667 / CVE-2014-9295 / VU#852879
  CVSS: (AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P) Base Score: 7.5
  Versions: All releases before 4.2.8
  Date Resolved: Stable (4.2.8) 18 Dec 2014

  Summary: When Autokey Authentication is enabled (i.e. the ntp.conf
  	file contains a 'crypto pw ...' directive) a remote attacker
	can send a carefully crafted packet that can overflow a stack
	buffer and potentially allow malicious code to be executed
	with the privilege level of the ntpd process.

  Mitigation: Upgrade to 4.2.8, or later, or
	Disable Autokey Authentication by removing, or commenting out,
	all configuration directives beginning with the crypto keyword
	in your ntp.conf file. 

  Credit: This vulnerability was discovered by Stephen Roettger of the
  	Google Security Team. 

* Buffer overflow in ctl_putdata()

  References: Sec 2668 / CVE-2014-9295 / VU#852879
  CVSS: (AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P) Base Score: 7.5
  Versions: All NTP4 releases before 4.2.8
  Date Resolved: Stable (4.2.8) 18 Dec 2014

  Summary: A remote attacker can send a carefully crafted packet that
  	can overflow a stack buffer and potentially allow malicious
	code to be executed with the privilege level of the ntpd process.

  Mitigation: Upgrade to 4.2.8, or later.

  Credit: This vulnerability was discovered by Stephen Roettger of the
  	Google Security Team. 

* Buffer overflow in configure()

  References: Sec 2669 / CVE-2014-9295 / VU#852879
  CVSS: (AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P) Base Score: 7.5
  Versions: All NTP4 releases before 4.2.8
  Date Resolved: Stable (4.2.8) 18 Dec 2014

  Summary: A remote attacker can send a carefully crafted packet that
	can overflow a stack buffer and potentially allow malicious
	code to be executed with the privilege level of the ntpd process.

  Mitigation: Upgrade to 4.2.8, or later.

  Credit: This vulnerability was discovered by Stephen Roettger of the
	Google Security Team. 

* receive(): missing return on error

  References: Sec 2670 / CVE-2014-9296 / VU#852879
  CVSS: (AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P) Base Score: 5.0
  Versions: All NTP4 releases before 4.2.8
  Date Resolved: Stable (4.2.8) 18 Dec 2014

  Summary: Code in ntp_proto.c:receive() was missing a 'return;' in
  	the code path where an error was detected, which meant
	processing did not stop when a specific rare error occurred.
	We haven't found a way for this bug to affect system integrity.
	If there is no way to affect system integrity the base CVSS
	score for this bug is 0. If there is one avenue through which
	system integrity can be partially affected, the base score
	becomes a 5. If system integrity can be partially affected
	via all three integrity metrics, the CVSS base score become 7.5.

  Mitigation:
        Upgrade to 4.2.8, or later,
        or Remove or comment out all configuration directives
	beginning with the crypto keyword in your ntp.conf file. 

  Credit: This vulnerability was discovered by Stephen Roettger of the
  	Google Security Team. 

See http://support.ntp.org/security for more information.

New features / changes in this release:

Important Changes

* Internal NTP Era counters

The internal counters that track the "era" (range of years) we are in
rolls over every 136 years'.  The current "era" started at the stroke of
midnight on 1 Jan 1900, and ends just before the stroke of midnight on
1 Jan 2036.
In the past, we have used the "midpoint" of the  range to decide which
era we were in.  Given the longevity of some products, it became clear
that it would be more functional to "look back" less, and "look forward"
more.  We now compile a timestamp into the ntpd executable and when we
get a timestamp we us the "built-on" to tell us what era we are in.
This check "looks back" 10 years, and "looks forward" 126 years.

* ntpdc responses disabled by default

Dave Hart writes:

For a long time, ntpq and its mostly text-based mode 6 (control) 
protocol have been preferred over ntpdc and its mode 7 (private 
request) protocol for runtime queries and configuration.  There has 
been a goal of deprecating ntpdc, previously held back by numerous 
capabilities exposed by ntpdc with no ntpq equivalent.  I have been 
adding commands to ntpq to cover these cases, and I believe I've 
covered them all, though I've not compared command-by-command 
recently. 

As I've said previously, the binary mode 7 protocol involves a lot of 
hand-rolled structure layout and byte-swapping code in both ntpd and 
ntpdc which is hard to get right.  As ntpd grows and changes, the 
changes are difficult to expose via ntpdc while maintaining forward 
and backward compatibility between ntpdc and ntpd.  In contrast, 
ntpq's text-based, label=value approach involves more code reuse and 
allows compatible changes without extra work in most cases. 

Mode 7 has always been defined as vendor/implementation-specific while 
mode 6 is described in RFC 1305 and intended to be open to interoperate 
with other implementations.  There is an early draft of an updated 
mode 6 description that likely will join the other NTPv4 RFCs 
eventually. (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-odonoghue-ntpv4-control-01)

For these reasons, ntpd 4.2.7p230 by default disables processing of 
ntpdc queries, reducing ntpd's attack surface and functionally 
deprecating ntpdc.  If you are in the habit of using ntpdc for certain 
operations, please try the ntpq equivalent.  If there's no equivalent, 
please open a bug report at http://bugs.ntp.org./

In addition to the above, over 1100 issues have been resolved between
the 4.2.6 branch and 4.2.8.  The ChangeLog file in the distribution
lists these.

--- 
NTP 4.2.6p5 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2011/12/24) 
 
Focus: Bug fixes
 
Severity: Medium 
 
This is a recommended upgrade. 

This release updates sys_rootdisp and sys_jitter calculations to match the
RFC specification, fixes a potential IPv6 address matching error for the
"nic" and "interface" configuration directives, suppresses the creation of
extraneous ephemeral associations for certain broadcastclient and
multicastclient configurations, cleans up some ntpq display issues, and
includes improvements to orphan mode, minor bugs fixes and code clean-ups.

New features / changes in this release:

ntpd

 * Updated "nic" and "interface" IPv6 address handling to prevent 
   mismatches with localhost [::1] and wildcard [::] which resulted from
   using the address/prefix format (e.g. fe80::/64)
 * Fix orphan mode stratum incorrectly counting to infinity
 * Orphan parent selection metric updated to includes missing ntohl()
 * Non-printable stratum 16 refid no longer sent to ntp
 * Duplicate ephemeral associations suppressed for broadcastclient and
   multicastclient without broadcastdelay
 * Exclude undetermined sys_refid from use in loopback TEST12
 * Exclude MODE_SERVER responses from KoD rate limiting
 * Include root delay in clock_update() sys_rootdisp calculations
 * get_systime() updated to exclude sys_residual offset (which only
   affected bits "below" sys_tick, the precision threshold)
 * sys.peer jitter weighting corrected in sys_jitter calculation

ntpq

 * -n option extended to include the billboard "server" column
 * IPv6 addresses in the local column truncated to prevent overruns

--- 
NTP 4.2.6p4 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2011/09/22) 
 
Focus: Bug fixes and portability improvements 
 
Severity: Medium 
 
This is a recommended upgrade. 
 
This release includes build infrastructure updates, code 
clean-ups, minor bug fixes, fixes for a number of minor 
ref-clock issues, and documentation revisions. 
 
Portability improvements affect AIX, HP-UX, Linux, OS X and 64-bit time_t. 
 
New features / changes in this release: 
 
Build system 
 
* Fix checking for struct rtattr 
* Update config.guess and config.sub for AIX 
* Upgrade required version of autogen and libopts for building 
  from our source code repository 
 
ntpd 
 
* Back-ported several fixes for Coverity warnings from ntp-dev 
* Fix a rare boundary condition in UNLINK_EXPR_SLIST() 
* Allow "logconfig =allall" configuration directive 
* Bind tentative IPv6 addresses on Linux 
* Correct WWVB/Spectracom driver to timestamp CR instead of LF 
* Improved tally bit handling to prevent incorrect ntpq peer status reports 
* Exclude the Undisciplined Local Clock and ACTS drivers from the initial 
  candidate list unless they are designated a "prefer peer" 
* Prevent the consideration of Undisciplined Local Clock or ACTS drivers for 
  selection during the 'tos orphanwait' period 
* Prefer an Orphan Mode Parent over the Undisciplined Local Clock or ACTS 
  drivers 
* Improved support of the Parse Refclock trusttime flag in Meinberg mode 
* Back-port utility routines from ntp-dev: mprintf(), emalloc_zero() 
* Added the NTPD_TICKADJ_PPM environment variable for specifying baseline 
  clock slew on Microsoft Windows 
* Code cleanup in libntpq 
 
ntpdc 
 
* Fix timerstats reporting 
 
ntpdate 
 
* Reduce time required to set clock 
* Allow a timeout greater than 2 seconds 
 
sntp 
 
* Backward incompatible command-line option change: 
  -l/--filelog changed -l/--logfile (to be consistent with ntpd) 
 
Documentation 
 
* Update html2man. Fix some tags in the .html files 
* Distribute ntp-wait.html 

---
NTP 4.2.6p3 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2011/01/03)

Focus: Bug fixes and portability improvements

Severity: Medium

This is a recommended upgrade.

This release includes build infrastructure updates, code
clean-ups, minor bug fixes, fixes for a number of minor
ref-clock issues, and documentation revisions.

Portability improvements in this release affect AIX, Atari FreeMiNT,
FreeBSD4, Linux and Microsoft Windows.

New features / changes in this release:

Build system
* Use lsb_release to get information about Linux distributions.
* 'test' is in /usr/bin (instead of /bin) on some systems.
* Basic sanity checks for the ChangeLog file.
* Source certain build files with ./filename for systems without . in PATH.
* IRIX portability fix.
* Use a single copy of the "libopts" code.
* autogen/libopts upgrade.
* configure.ac m4 quoting cleanup.

ntpd
* Do not bind to IN6_IFF_ANYCAST addresses.
* Log the reason for exiting under Windows.
* Multicast fixes for Windows.
* Interpolation fixes for Windows.
* IPv4 and IPv6 Multicast fixes.
* Manycast solicitation fixes and general repairs.
* JJY refclock cleanup.
* NMEA refclock improvements.
* Oncore debug message cleanup.
* Palisade refclock now builds under Linux.
* Give RAWDCF more baud rates.
* Support Truetime Satellite clocks under Windows.
* Support Arbiter 1093C Satellite clocks under Windows.
* Make sure that the "filegen" configuration command defaults to "enable".
* Range-check the status codes (plus other cleanup) in the RIPE-NCC driver.
* Prohibit 'includefile' directive in remote configuration command.
* Fix 'nic' interface bindings.
* Fix the way we link with openssl if openssl is installed in the base
  system.

ntp-keygen
* Fix -V coredump.
* OpenSSL version display cleanup.

ntpdc
* Many counters should be treated as unsigned.

ntpdate
* Do not ignore replies with equal receive and transmit timestamps.

ntpq
* libntpq warning cleanup.

ntpsnmpd
* Correct SNMP type for "precision" and "resolution".
* Update the MIB from the draft version to RFC-5907.

sntp
* Display timezone offset when showing time for sntp in the local
  timezone.
* Pay proper attention to RATE KoD packets.
* Fix a miscalculation of the offset.
* Properly parse empty lines in the key file.
* Logging cleanup.
* Use tv_usec correctly in set_time().
* Documentation cleanup.

---
NTP 4.2.6p2 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2010/07/08)

Focus: Bug fixes and portability improvements

Severity: Medium

This is a recommended upgrade.

This release includes build infrastructure updates, code
clean-ups, minor bug fixes, fixes for a number of minor
ref-clock issues, improved KOD handling, OpenSSL related
updates and documentation revisions.

Portability improvements in this release affect Irix, Linux,
Mac OS, Microsoft Windows, OpenBSD and QNX6

New features / changes in this release:

ntpd
* Range syntax for the trustedkey configuration directive
* Unified IPv4 and IPv6 restrict lists

ntpdate
* Rate limiting and KOD handling

ntpsnmpd
* default connection to net-snmpd via a unix-domain socket
* command-line 'socket name' option

ntpq / ntpdc
* support for the "passwd ..." syntax
* key-type specific password prompts

sntp
* MD5 authentication of an ntpd
* Broadcast and crypto
* OpenSSL support

---
NTP 4.2.6p1 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2010/04/09)

Focus: Bug fixes, portability fixes, and documentation improvements

Severity: Medium

This is a recommended upgrade.

---
NTP 4.2.6 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2009/12/08)

Focus: enhancements and bug fixes.

---
NTP 4.2.4p8 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2009/12/08)

Focus: Security Fixes

Severity: HIGH

This release fixes the following high-severity vulnerability:

* [Sec 1331] DoS with mode 7 packets - CVE-2009-3563.

  See http://support.ntp.org/security for more information.

  NTP mode 7 (MODE_PRIVATE) is used by the ntpdc query and control utility.
  In contrast, ntpq uses NTP mode 6 (MODE_CONTROL), while routine NTP time
  transfers use modes 1 through 5.  Upon receipt of an incorrect mode 7
  request or a mode 7 error response from an address which is not listed
  in a "restrict ... noquery" or "restrict ... ignore" statement, ntpd will
  reply with a mode 7 error response (and log a message).  In this case:

	* If an attacker spoofs the source address of ntpd host A in a
	  mode 7 response packet sent to ntpd host B, both A and B will
	  continuously send each other error responses, for as long as
	  those packets get through.

	* If an attacker spoofs an address of ntpd host A in a mode 7
	  response packet sent to ntpd host A, A will respond to itself
	  endlessly, consuming CPU and logging excessively.

  Credit for finding this vulnerability goes to Robin Park and Dmitri
  Vinokurov of Alcatel-Lucent.

THIS IS A STRONGLY RECOMMENDED UPGRADE.

---
ntpd now syncs to refclocks right away.

Backward-Incompatible changes:

ntpd no longer accepts '-v name' or '-V name' to define internal variables.
Use '--var name' or '--dvar name' instead. (Bug 817)

---
NTP 4.2.4p7 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2009/05/04)

Focus: Security and Bug Fixes

Severity: HIGH

This release fixes the following high-severity vulnerability:

* [Sec 1151] Remote exploit if autokey is enabled.  CVE-2009-1252

  See http://support.ntp.org/security for more information.

  If autokey is enabled (if ntp.conf contains a "crypto pw whatever"
  line) then a carefully crafted packet sent to the machine will cause
  a buffer overflow and possible execution of injected code, running
  with the privileges of the ntpd process (often root).

  Credit for finding this vulnerability goes to Chris Ries of CMU.

This release fixes the following low-severity vulnerabilities:

* [Sec 1144] limited (two byte) buffer overflow in ntpq.  CVE-2009-0159
  Credit for finding this vulnerability goes to Geoff Keating of Apple.
  
* [Sec 1149] use SO_EXCLUSIVEADDRUSE on Windows
  Credit for finding this issue goes to Dave Hart.

This release fixes a number of bugs and adds some improvements:

* Improved logging
* Fix many compiler warnings
* Many fixes and improvements for Windows
* Adds support for AIX 6.1
* Resolves some issues under MacOS X and Solaris

THIS IS A STRONGLY RECOMMENDED UPGRADE.

---
NTP 4.2.4p6 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2009/01/07)

Focus: Security Fix

Severity: Low

This release fixes oCERT.org's CVE-2009-0021, a vulnerability affecting
the OpenSSL library relating to the incorrect checking of the return
value of EVP_VerifyFinal function.

Credit for finding this issue goes to the Google Security Team for
finding the original issue with OpenSSL, and to ocert.org for finding
the problem in NTP and telling us about it.

This is a recommended upgrade.
---
NTP 4.2.4p5 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2008/08/17)

Focus: Minor Bugfixes 

This release fixes a number of Windows-specific ntpd bugs and 
platform-independent ntpdate bugs. A logging bugfix has been applied
to the ONCORE driver.

The "dynamic" keyword and is now obsolete and deferred binding to local 
interfaces is the new default. The minimum time restriction for the 
interface update interval has been dropped. 

A number of minor build system and documentation fixes are included. 

This is a recommended upgrade for Windows. 

---
NTP 4.2.4p4 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2007/09/10)

Focus: Minor Bugfixes

This release updates certain copyright information, fixes several display
bugs in ntpdc, avoids SIGIO interrupting malloc(), cleans up file descriptor
shutdown in the parse refclock driver, removes some lint from the code,
stops accessing certain buffers immediately after they were freed, fixes
a problem with non-command-line specification of -6, and allows the loopback
interface to share addresses with other interfaces.

---
NTP 4.2.4p3 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2007/06/29)

Focus: Minor Bugfixes

This release fixes a bug in Windows that made it difficult to
terminate ntpd under windows.
This is a recommended upgrade for Windows.

---
NTP 4.2.4p2 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2007/06/19)

Focus: Minor Bugfixes

This release fixes a multicast mode authentication problem, 
an error in NTP packet handling on Windows that could lead to 
ntpd crashing, and several other minor bugs. Handling of 
multicast interfaces and logging configuration were improved. 
The required versions of autogen and libopts were incremented.
This is a recommended upgrade for Windows and multicast users.

---
NTP 4.2.4 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2006/12/31)

Focus: enhancements and bug fixes.

Dynamic interface rescanning was added to simplify the use of ntpd in 
conjunction with DHCP. GNU AutoGen is used for its command-line options 
processing. Separate PPS devices are supported for PARSE refclocks, MD5 
signatures are now provided for the release files. Drivers have been 
added for some new ref-clocks and have been removed for some older 
ref-clocks. This release also includes other improvements, documentation 
and bug fixes. 

K&R C is no longer supported as of NTP-4.2.4. We are now aiming for ANSI 
C support.

---
NTP 4.2.0 (Harlan Stenn <stenn@ntp.org>, 2003/10/15)

Focus: enhancements and bug fixes.