I wonder if this feature might be “infectious”: if a handful of servers wind up with the wrong time, and start propagating that wrong time in their server handshakes, it might cause a cascade of other servers to reset their times too.
In any case, it seems like a poor solution especially given that random timestamps can occasionally look valid (they’re random!).
The problem they’re trying to solve seems to be to obtain a trustworthy timestamp in the presence of a potentially hostile network - one that could be presenting expired, cracked certificates for every connection to arbitrarily tamper with all SSL connections. It’s not a trivial problem, for sure, but resetting perfectly valid clocks using this algorithm seems like a strict downgrade….
In any case, it seems like a poor solution especially given that random timestamps can occasionally look valid (they’re random!).
The problem they’re trying to solve seems to be to obtain a trustworthy timestamp in the presence of a potentially hostile network - one that could be presenting expired, cracked certificates for every connection to arbitrarily tamper with all SSL connections. It’s not a trivial problem, for sure, but resetting perfectly valid clocks using this algorithm seems like a strict downgrade….