[rnijveld]

I do think that memory safety is important for any network service. The probability of something going horribly wrong when a network packet is parsed in a wrong way is just too high. NTP typically does have more access to the host OS than other daemons, with it needing to adjust the system clock.

Of course, there are many other services that could be made memory safe, and maybe there is some sort of right or smart order in which we should make our core network infrastructure memory safe. But everyone has their own priorities here, and I feel like this could end up being an endless debate of whatabout-ism. There is no right place to start, other than to just start.

Aside from memory safety though, I feel like our implementation has a strong focus on security in general. We try and make choices that make our implementation more robust than what was out there previously. Aside from that, I think the NTP space has had an under supply of implementations, with there only being a few major open source implementations (like ntpd, ntpsec and chrony). Meanwhile, NTP is one of those pieces of technology at the core of many of the things we do on the modern internet. Knowing the current time is one of these things you just need in order to trust many of the things we take for granted (without knowledge of the current time, your TLS connection could never be trusted). I think NTP definitely deserves this attention and could use a bunch more attention.