this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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167
Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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STS (Secure Time Seeding) uses server time from SSL handshakes, which is fine when talking to other Microsoft servers, but other implementations put random data in that field to prevent fingerprinting.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A few months ago, an engineer in a data center in Norway encountered some perplexing errors that caused a Windows server to suddenly reset its system clock to 55 days in the future.

“With these updated routing tables, a lot of people were unable to make calls, as we didn't have a correct state!” the engineer, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Simen, wrote in an email.

Simen had experienced a similar error last August when a machine running Windows Server 2019 reset its clock to January 2023 and then changed it back a short time later.

Windows systems with clocks set to the wrong time can cause disastrous errors when they can’t properly parse timestamps in digital certificates or they execute jobs too early, too late, or out of the prescribed order.

The mechanism, Microsoft engineers wrote, “helped us to break the cyclical dependency between client system time and security keys, including SSL certificates.”

Simen and Ken, who both asked to be identified only by their first names because they weren’t authorized by their employers to speak on the record, soon found that engineers and administrators had been reporting the same time resets since 2016.

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