Geoff Huston looks at the network time protocol, and efforts to secure it, in detail. NTP operates in the clear, and it is often the case that the servers used by a client are not local. This provides an opportunity for an adversary to disrupt an NTP session, by masquerading as a NTP server, or altering NTP payloads in an effort to disrupt a client's time-of-day clock. Many application-level protocols are time sensitive, including TLS, HTTPS, DNSSEC and NFS. Most Cloud applications rely on a coordinated time to determine the most recent version of a data object. Disrupting time can cause significant chaos in distributed network environments. While it can be relatively straightforward to secure a TCP-based protocol by adding an initial TLS handshake and operating a TLS shim between TCP and the application traffic, it's not so straightforward to use TLS in place of a UDP-based protocol for NTP. TLS can add significant jitter to the packet exchange. Where the privacy of the UDP payload is
Did you miss this week’s top articles? Here are the five most read article on FOSS Force for the week that just ended. The post FOSS Force’s Top Five Articles — For the Week Ending March 6, 2026 appeared first on FOSS Force.
AMD's GAIA open-source framework for building AI agents that run locally on Ryzen AI hardware via the Radeon iGPUs and/or NPUs is up to version 0.16. With this new GAIA release is support for developing AI agents purely in C++ with no longer needing to depend upon Python...
The effort around improving FreeBSD on laptops continues full speed ahead in 2026. The upcoming FreeBSD 15.1 remains on track with not only having a KDE desktop option from FreeBSD's text-based installer UI but also improved Realtek WiFi adapter support is on the way, updating of the graphics drivers from Linux, and more...
In addition to the 3mdeb firmware consulting firm porting Coreboot with AMD openSIL to an EPYC 9005 "Turin" Gigabyte motherboard, their developers have also been working on a similar Coreboot + openSIL port to an AM5 Ryzen consumer motherboard...
Resources, the modern GNOME GTK4/libadwaita-based GUI application for system resource monitoring and an alternative to GNOME System Monitor, is out with a new update. Resources 1.10.2 brings some nice improvements for those running GNOME on modern Intel hardware...
Pigeon Email Notifier is a GNOME Shell extension that does one thing: show a desktop notification when new mail arrives in your Gmail, Microsoft Outlook or IMAP webmail account. If you don’t want to leave a webmail tab open in Firefox, the overhead of a desktop email app like Thunderbird, or your provider doesn’t offer a desktop Linux app (like Fastmail and Proton Mail now do), Pigeon provides a set-and-forget way to still get new mail alerts. Desktop email notifiers have been around for a long time. I’ve written about many standalone tools, like Unity Mail, Popper and Mail Nag over […]
Linux News