Recent NTP pool traffic increase

Mon Dec 19 21:12:27 UTC 2016

On 2016-12-19 1:55 PM, Jan Tore Morken wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 01:32:50PM -0700, David wrote:
>> I found devices doing lookups for all of these at the same time
>> {0,0.uk,0.us,asia,europe,north-america,south-america,oceania,africa,europe}.pool.ntp.org
>> and then it proceeds to use everything returned, which explains why
>> everyone is seeing an increase.
>
> Thanks, David. That perfectly matches the list of servers used by
> older versions of the ios-ntp library[1][2], which would point toward
> some iPhone app being the source of the traffic.
>
> [1] https://github.com/jbenet/ios-ntp/blob/d5eade6a99041094f12f0c976dd4aaeed37e0564/ios-ntp-rez/ntp.hosts
> [2] https://github.com/jbenet/ios-ntp/blob/5cc3b6e437a6422dcee9dec9da5183e283eff9f2/ios-ntp-lib/NetworkClock.m#L122
>

That would make sense - I see a lot of iCloud related lookups from these 
hosts as well.

Also, app.snapchat.com generally seems to follow just after the NTP pool 
DNS lookups. I don't have an iPhone to test that though.

Thanks,