history.txt

= How NTPsec came to be =

The prehistory of the NTPsec project goes back to 2013, when one of
the team members offered to help migrate the NTP Classic history out
of BitKeeper to git or hg - anything that might increase community
access and participation.  Said member (ESR) was then, and still is,
the open-source community's go-to guy for large, messy repository
conversions.  Harlan Stenn, the lead of NTP Classic, was determined to
hold on to BitKeeper and refused the offer.

In late 2014 another founding member - Susan Sons - became aware
that NTP Classic instances were routinely being used as amplifiers
for DDoS attacks.  Investigating, she became concerned with what
she learned about the state of NTP Classic.  When she communicated
the results of her research to her superiors at the Center for Applied
Cybersecurity Research, they contacted the National Science Foundation
- which became so alarmed that it approved funding for a rescue
intervention (something it had never done before) in _two days_.

Grant approval in hand, Susan needed a technical team.  She recruited
ESR, who recruited Gary Miller and Hal Murray.  Some technical plans
and the broad direction of the project began to take shape.  Amar
Takhar, who had been a system administrator for the NTP Classic
project, joined the conversation in mid-February.

In Hal and Amar, Susan's team included two prominent members of NTP
Classic's user and developer community.  Gary and ESR, though not
directly members themselves, had ties to that community through their
time-service work on the GPSD project.  The ideal outcome for all of
us and the NSF would have been to re-invigorate the NTP Classic
codebase within the organizational framework of Harlan Stenn's Network
Time Foundation.  We negotiated with Harlan Stenn towards this end.

A meeting of minds should have been possible.  Stenn had been
complaining for years that NTP development was held up by
lack of skilled developer time and a support budget. The NSF's
rescue intervention offered both.

It was not to be.  Stenn insisted that development must remain on
BitKeeper, a choice which the rescue team felt would continue to wall
off the NTP Classic codebase from the wider open-source community and
thus perpetuate its dangerously stagnant state.

Following the collapse of negotiations, Amar Takhar made the decision
to initiate a project fork, and invited the rescue team members to
help it happen.  ESR and Gary signed on immediately, Hal a few weeks
later.  After considering other candidates to be the new project's
security officer, Amar asked Susan to join up in that role and she
accepted.  Subsequently Amar recruited Chris Johns from the RTEMS
project. Gary Miller assisted with the repository migration and
some early cleanup work, but resigned from the team before launch.

Forking a project, especially a mature and well-established project
like NTP, is never a decision to be made lightly.  The team regrets the
necessity, but we felt that NTP is far too important a part of the
Internet infrastructure to be allowed to fall further into decay.

The team began work to fulfill the NSF's grant terms, migrating the
history to git and showing measurable progress towards
security-hardening the code. We also began to quietly prepare for a
public project launch.  In June 2015 we gained funding from the Linux
Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative.  Around the same time
Dr. Joel Sherrill, learning of our effort and its goals, resigned from
the Network Time Foundation board and joined our team.

Through the late summer and fall of 2015 the team worked on the
massive cleanup required to remove obsolete code, fix documentation,
and live-rest the results.  We removed over half the bulk of the
NTP Classic codebase and significantly security-hardened what was
left.  We changed build systems from autoconf to waf for a dramatic
improvement in build times and repeatability.

In late September Mark Atwood stepped up to manage the project,
freeing Amar to concentrate on his technical work.  Shortly after that
we began active cooperation with three different security-research
groups to find and fix NTP vulnerabilities, and Daniel Franke joined
the team as our crypto expert.

In early October we began planning for an 0.90 beta release. That
release is scheduled for November 16th.

The rest of the story has yet to be written.

//end