[5] OpenNTPD was designed to solve these problems and make time synchronization accessible to a wider userbase.

[7] OpenNTPD is an attempt by the OpenBSD team to produce an NTP daemon implementation that is secure, simple to audit, trivial to set up and administer, reasonably accurate, and light on system resources.

[8] Security in OpenNTPD is achieved by robust validity check in the network input path, use of bounded buffer operations via strlcpy, and privilege separation to mitigate the effects of possible security bugs exploiting the daemon through privilege escalation.

The objective is to provide enough features to satisfy typical usage at the risk of unsuitability for esoteric or niche requirements.

[9] A minimal number of options are offered: IP address or hostname on which OpenNTPD should listen, a timedelta sensor device to be used, and the set of servers from which the time will be synchronized.

The OpenNTPD project acknowledged the criticism, but stated that the lack of microsecond precision was a design tradeoff that benefited simplicity and security.

In December 2004, Darren Tucker, the principal developer on the portable branch of OpenNTPD, wrote a detailed response to Knowles, acknowledging some issues as valid, rejecting several others as unwarranted, and considering yet others as misleading.