Abstract

Time synchronization is of paramount importance on the Internet, with the Network Time Protocol (NTP) serving as the primary synchronization protocol. The NTP Pool, a volunteer-driven initiative launched two decades ago, facilitates connections between clients and NTP servers. Our analysis of root DNS queries reveals that the NTP Pool has consistently been the most popular time service. We further investigate the DNS component (GeoDNS) of the NTP Pool, which is responsible for mapping clients to servers. Our findings indicate that the current algorithm is heavily skewed, leading to the emergence of time monopolies for entire countries. For instance, clients in the US are served by 551 NTP servers, while clients in Cameroon and Nigeria are served by only one and two servers, respectively, out of the 4k+ servers available in the NTP Pool. We examine the underlying assumption behind GeoDNS for these …

Date

February 21, 2024

Authors

Giovane CM Moura, Marco Davids, Caspar Schutijser, Cristian Hesselman, John Heidemann, Georgios Smaragdakis

Journal

Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems

Volume

8

Issue

1

Pages

1-30

Publisher

ACM