Authenticating NTP peers

To turn on authentication of synchronization requests from NTP peers:

1. Create a set of keys that will be used for authenticating requests to synchronize with peers. Typically, you would define one key per group of peers. The format of such keys is described in ``The NTP keys file''.

2. On each host on which you want to configure authentication, add the following lines to the /etc/inet/ntp.conf file if not already present:

   authenticate yes
   keys /etc/inet/ntp.keys
   

   If the line currently defines authenticate as no, change the value to yes.

3. Add the following line to /etc/inet/ntp.conf:

   trustedkey ID1 ID2 ... IDn
   

   This line lists the IDs of the keys from the keys file that will be used to authenticate synchronization requests from certain groups of peers.

4. If it does not already exist, create a /etc/inet/ntp.keys keys file on each peer, and add the keys for the groups of peers with which this peer will be allowed to synchronize.

5. To have xntpd re-read its configuration file, do one of the following:

   • Stop xntpd by killing its process ID found using ps, then restart it using the command in.xntpd &.

   • If a key entry exists to allow runtime reconfiguration (see ``Authenticating NTP runtime reconfiguration''), run xntpdc and use the readkeys command to have xntpd read the keys file.