[Bug 27915] New: Clients of WebSockets are not NTP synced (and there is no NTP-alike spec)

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=27915

            Bug ID: 27915
           Summary: Clients of WebSockets are not NTP synced (and there is
                    no NTP-alike spec)
           Product: WebAppsWG
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: PC
                OS: Linux
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: WebSocket API (editor: Ian Hickson)
          Assignee: ian@hixie.ch
          Reporter: cmartensms@gmail.com
        QA Contact: public-webapps-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: mike@w3.org, public-webapps@w3.org

All major browsers (Chromium, Opera, Firefox, IE) have problems when being used
in realtime networking applications.

Date.now() inside the browser is not synced with NTP, therefore clients can
gain access to systems when they reset their clock to a previous date when
WebRTC or WebSockets are used peer-to-peer.

I think we need desperately a WebSocket extensions spec that can be implemented
in order to sync the network connection with a heartbeat and tick(-ack).

>From a developer perspective, I can't believe nobody had the issue before.
There are also no libraries available, which seems surreal as there are
thousands of users of Socket.IO and other WebSocket libraries where all the
libraries depend on a synced clock as they are using Date.now() etc.


My questions so far are:
- Why are browsers not synced with NTP in the background?
- Why is there no WebSocket extension spec that implements an NTP-like
behaviour?
- How to overwrite the behaviour of Date.now(), it is pretty much bad approach
to do so?

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Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2015 07:00:25 UTC