Experimental Analysis of the Performance and Scalability of Network Time Security for the Network Time Protocol

Abstract

Network Time Security (NTS) standardizes mechanisms that allow clients to authenticate timing information received via Network Time Protocol (NTP). NTS includes a new key establishment protocol, NTS-KE, and extension fields for NTPv4 which, when utilized together, allow clients to authenticate messages from time servers. Utilizing an open source implementation of each, we determine the existence and severity of any performance or scalability impact introduced by NTS when compared to NTP. We found that conducting individual authenticated time transfer takes approximately 116% longer when utilizing NTS over NTP. Additionally, we found that NTS-KE can only support approximately 2000 requests per second before a substantial and consistent increase in turnaround time is observed.