oss-sec mailing list archives
Re: can we talk about secure time?
From: Florian Weimer <fw () deneb enyo de>
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 12:31:07 +0100
* Hanno Böck:
Is there any reason not to tell everyone to use tlsdate?
Some folks want to run their servers within a few milliseconds of each other, and do not care so much about security or resiliency. They may even use their own internal time source (either fed by the local standard time over NTP, or by GPS, CDMA or some other wireless time service such as DCF-77 in Germany). Reconciling this with cryptography is certainly a challenge. On the other hand, this does not have to be the default.
What's the distro's take on this? afaik many ship ntp-based solutions by default.
NTP (as in protocol), yes, ntp (as in implementation), perhaps not. I think most desktop-based distributions could get away with something like tlsdate. In contrast, servers with long-running connections and I/O polling loops often do not react gracefully to jumps in time. (I once disconnected a few hundreds, if not thousands of users from an IRC server just by setting its time correctly.) Sure, you can avoid that by using the appropriate kernel clock for timeout handling, but I have the impression that the correct clock changes every couple of years.
Current thread:
- can we talk about secure time? Hanno Böck (Dec 20)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Stuart Henderson (Dec 20)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Daniel Kahn Gillmor (Dec 20)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? ncl () cock li (Dec 20)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Daniel Micay (Dec 20)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Florian Weimer (Dec 21)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Daniel Micay (Dec 21)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Dave Horsfall (Dec 21)
- leap seconds and security [was: Re: can we talk about secure time?] Daniel Kahn Gillmor (Dec 21)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Florian Weimer (Dec 21)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Hanno Böck (Dec 21)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Kurt Seifried (Dec 21)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Hanno Böck (Dec 21)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Walter Parker (Dec 21)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? John Haxby (Dec 22)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Dave Horsfall (Dec 22)
- Re: can we talk about secure time? Stuart Henderson (Dec 20)