On 03/21/2018 04:36 AM, Tabor Kelly wrote:
>
> Also, let's say that you are going to ship an IoT product without a
> realtime clock. Your first libcurl request could be to a C&C server to
> get the time, but you would need to use TLS and actually validate the
> chain of trust to prevent a MITM attack and you would need to disable
> the date checking (just for this first request). My pull request can
> be found here:
> https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/2405
Just a suggestion: why don't you sync your IoT product clock to a public
pool of NTP servers? NTP is not supported by curl, but there are some
open-source projects that can run as a detached daemon to sync your
clock. See http://www.ntp.org/downloads.html, https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/

NTP is unencrypted UDP and only deals with time: at its own level, there
is no possible information leakage and a MITM can only fool your clock.
While not 100% safe, it is still widely used. See
http://www.cs.bu.edu/~goldbe/papers/NTPattack.pdf.

Even if you don't have access to the public Internet, you can set-up an
autonomous NTP server on your LAN: it won't have the precision of
stratum 1 servers, but can be tuned to be accurate enough for your needs.

In addition, if you want to set your IoT device time ASAP after power-up
to avoid it "jumps" back to the time origin before NTP does its job, you
can use my own daemon that loads time from a file early after power-on
and saves it periodically. Of course, it requires some storage is
available on the device. I use it successfully on very old PCs with flat
batteries and on Raspberry Pi for a long time. Even if you don't use NTP
but a C&C server, it can help you much providing you don't let your
device off for months and the C&C server certificate renewal sets a
start date in the past when installed. See
https://github.com/monnerat/saveclock.

In any case, this is much more sane than bypassing certificate time
range validity and will also benefit to other parts of your OS and
application.
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Received on 2018-03-21