Pendulum long-term goals: usability and security (video)

David
Security software engineer
Pendulum long-term goals: usability and security (video)
I was invited by OCP-TAP to join them in their 87th Project Call to talk about Pendulum, our Rust implementations of NTP and PTP. The recording of this call on 8 Nov 2023 is now available.

Video

In this talk, I introduce the NTPD-rs and Statime implementations of NTP and PTP respectively. I discuss the origins of the projects, their current state, and our long-term goals for both projects with respect to usability and security. I also go into detail on where our implementations deviate from the respective standards, why we deviate and why we believe our choices don't impact interoperability.

Slides

A PDF of the slides is available here.

OCP-TAP

OCP-TAP is short (very short) for the Time Appliances Project, by the Open Compute Project. In their own words, "the Open Compute Project (OCP) is a collaborative community focused on redesigning hardware technology to efficiently support the growing demands on compute infrastructure."

"Time Appliances Project (TAP) aims [...] to bring together the community of datacenter operators, application developers, and equipment and semiconductor companies [...] to enable datacenter time-sensitive applications such as consistency in distributed systems, edge computing, AR/VR and IoT. These applications will greatly benefit from high accuracy, reliable, and scalable distribution and synchronization of time."

Pendulum

The Pendulum project, containing both NTPD-rs and Statime, is an open-source time synchronisation project. You can check out the repositories on GitHub or read more about time synchornisation in our various blogs.

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The Pendulum project is building modern, full-featured implementations of the Network Time Protocol and the Precision Time Protocol. Pendulum focuses on security and robustness, and uses the Rust programming language to guarantee memory safety.

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