Re: can we talk about secure time?

[Daniel Micay <danielmicay () gmail com>]

On 21/12/14 06:31 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
> 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.

I don't think it has ever changed. CLOCK_MONOTONIC won't *ever* jump
either forwards or backwards, but is impacted by clock skew. I don't
think most use cases actually want CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW, especially
considering that there's no vdso implementation so it's slow.

Of course, there's lots of buggy software which is why we have stuff
like ASLR / SSP in the first place. :)

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