Roughenough

Roughenough is a Roughtime secure time synchronization client and server implementation in Rust.

The server is functionally complete: it parses client requests and generates valid Roughtime responses. Some unimplemented features remain, see server limitations below.

The client is also functionally complete and validaties the Merkle Tree in responses, if present.

Contributions are welcome.

Building and Running

Using the Client to Query a Roughtime Server

bash $ cargo build --release $ target/release/client roughtime.int08h.com 2002 Requesting time from: "roughtime.int08h.com":2002 Recieved time from server: midpoint="Mar 10 2018 21:35:52", radius=1000000

The client binary is target/release/client. After building you can copy the binary and run on its own (no cargo needed) if you wish.

bash $ cp target/release/server /usr/local/bin

Starting the Server

bash $ cargo build --release $ target/release/server example.cfg 2018-02-25 00:05:09 INFO [server] Roughenough server v0.2.0 starting 2018-02-25 00:05:09 INFO [server] Long-term public key: d0756ee69ff5fe96cbcf9273208fec53124b1dd3a24d3910e07c7c54e2473012 2018-02-25 00:05:09 INFO [server] Ephemeral public key: 25fd5dc31ceee241aed3e643534e95ed0609e9a20982a45ac0312a5f55e2cc66 2018-02-25 00:05:09 INFO [server] Server listening on 127.0.0.1:8686

The resulting binary is target/release/server. After building you can copy the binary and run on its own (no cargo needed):

bash $ cp target/release/server /usr/local/bin $ /usr/local/bin/server /path/to/config.file

Configuration File

The server is configured via a YAML file:

yaml interface: 127.0.0.1 port: 8686 seed: f61075c988feb9cb700a4a6a3291bfbc9cab11b9c9eca8c802468eb38a43d7d3

Where:

interface - IP address or interface name for listening to client requests
port - UDP port to listen for requests
seed - A 32-byte hexadecimal value used to generate the server's long-term key pair. This is a secret value and must be un-guessable, treat it with care.

Stopping the Server

Use Ctrl-C or kill the process.

Server Limitations

Roughtime features not implemented by the server:

On-line key rotation. The server must be restarted to generate a new delegated key.
Multi-request Merkle Tree batching. For now each request gets its own response with PATH empty and INDX zero.
The Rougheough server depends on the host's time source to comply with the smeared leap-second requirement of the Roughtime protocol. A Roughenough server sourcing time from Google's public NTP servers would produce compliant smeared leap-seconds but time sourced from members of pool.ntp.org likely will not.
Ecosystem-style response fault injection.

Other notes:

Error-handling needs a closer examination to verify the unwrap()'s and expect()'s present in the request handling path are for truly exceptional conditions.
Per-request heap allocations could probably be reduced: a few Vec's could be replaced by lifetime scoped slices.

About the Roughtime Protocol

Roughtime is a protocol that aims to achieve rough time synchronisation in a secure way that doesn't depend on any particular time server, and in such a way that, if a time server does misbehave, clients end up with cryptographic proof of it. It was created by Adam Langley and Robert Obryk.

Contributors

Stuart Stock, original author and current maintainer (stuart {at} int08h.com)
Aaron Hill, client implementation (aa1ronham {at} gmail.com)

Copyright and License

int08h LLC licenses Roughenough (the "Software") to you under the Apache License, version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this Software except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License from the LICENSE file included with the Software or at:

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.