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Re: [openpgp] Dealing with clock skew

2019-11-18 03:50:30
On Sat, Nov 16, 2019 at 03:06:13PM -0800, Jon Callas wrote:


In the general case, you can't consider a time measurement to be a scalar, it 
has to be at the very least a complex number of the form [time, skew]. As 
Derek noted, Kerberos used a skew of five minutes. While Neal Walfield noted 
in his original post that he's seen skew of 20min, I concur that that seems a 
bit long. My naive home set-up commonly has alarms across devices being ±2s 
or less, but that's because they're all getting time from some combination of 
NTP and cellular network time, which is ultimately GPS time (and of course, 
skew). I think five minutes is likely reasonable, but *some* skew is 
unavoidable. Moreover, anyone who's on satellite networks is seeing latency 
of over a second and once you throw in normal exponential backoff, five 
minutes seems about as short as is reasonable.

I believe that if Kerberos was starting over now, the 5 minutes would be
seen as excessively long, FWIW.

-Ben

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