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Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 10:15:18 +0000
From: John Haxby <john.haxby@...cle.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: can we talk about secure time?

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On 22/12/14 05:51, Hanno Böck wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 12:31:07 +0100 Florian Weimer
> <fw@...eb.enyo.de> wrote:
> 
>>> Some folks want to run their servers within a few milliseconds
>>> of each other, and do not care so much about security or
>>> resiliency.
> I perfectly understand that some people need more accuracy than
> tlsdate can give. However it's probably rare, right? I don't see
> any reason why average consumer hardware (Desktop, smartphone etc.)
> would have any problem with the 1-2 sec max inaccuracy of tlsdate.
> 

Basically to agree with Kurt: reconciling logs across multiple systems
often requires clocks to agree to within a few milliseconds a most.
The log files you're trying to reconcile may be from machines on
different continents as well which is why ntp is so useful: everyone
has the same idea of time.  The potential for an added or removed
second at end of of June and December can cause some excitement.

I've also known a one or two second discrepancy break 'make'.   That
was probably more to do with the fragility of that particular build
system rather than a a clock synchronization issue, but the point is
that properly accurate time is important to a lot of people.

jch
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