[chlorion]

>How do you know they are unsafe? Have they been audited and memory un-safety been found?

Security vulnerabilities caused by memory safety errors can be an indication.

The number of CVEs doesn't necessarily indicate the number of errors in the code, or whether or not something is secure, since there are a lot of factors at play. A project with many CVEs could be a good sign since it means people are actively looking for and reporting issues for example. Alternatively a project with few CVEs might have a ton of hidden bugs.

It's not a perfect measure for sure, but it can at least prove that there are real world memory safety bugs that can have disastrous effects if left unfixed.

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=ntpd

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=chrony

[fbdab103]

For those that did not click on the link, that lists 11 CVEs for chrony and 68 for ntpd

[mlichvar]

FWIW, from those 11 chrony CVEs:

- 8 were found within the project itself (mostly by me)

- none are memory-safety issues in the NTP-specific code

- the last memory-safety issue is from 2015 and it was in the custom management protocol (exploitable only by authenticated users), which was since then greatly simplified and made stateless

The project now has an excellent fuzzing coverage, it was audited, and I'm quite confident there are no remotely reachable memory-safety issues. I'll buy you a drink if you find one :).

NTP as a network protocol is extremely simple. There is no complex data, almost everything has a constant length. A minimal server+client implementation can be written in a few hundred lines of code. I wrote one in Rust, but the reason was server performance, not security.

Most of the complexity related to NTP is on the client side, in the processing of measurements provided by NTP. I don't think the language matters much here. However, if major operating systems will start switching to services written in Rust, I don't see a reason why chrony couldn't be rewritten in Rust, first the small parts related to networking and later everything.

[ok_dad]

Thanks for actually showing me some concrete examples of my wrongness instead of just attacking my character like a few others here (not my main thread here, that was a great discussion).