In the wake of the Ars Technica article on NTP vulnerabilities, and Slashdot coverage, there has been sharply increased public interest in the work NTPsec is doing.
A lot of people have gotten the idea that I’m engaged in a full rewrite of the code, however, and that’s not accurate. What’s actually going on is more like a really massive cleanup and hardening effort. To give you some idea how massive, I report that the codebase is now down to about 43% of the size we inherited – in absolute numbers, down from 227KLOC to 97KLOC.
Details, possibly interesting, follow. But this is more than a summary of work; I’m going to use it to talk about good software-engineering practice by example.