[RADIATOR] TOTP clock drift tracking

Roy Badami roy.badami at roboreus.com
Tue Aug 21 07:33:08 CDT 2012


On 21/08/2012 11:17, Heikki Vatiainen wrote:
> The default settings allow for 30 second clock drift (DelayWindow 1, 
> TimeStep 30). I am not aware of reports with clock drift being a 
> problem, so it would be interesting to hear how well the HW tokens 
> keep the time.

Vasco tokens certainly need this (and RADIATOR supports this - although 
it is implemented by the Vasco libraries rather than by RADIATOR 
itself).  The default parameters in RADIATOR are such as to allow quite 
a lot of clock drift - see the ITimeWindow and SyncWindow parameters to 
AuthBy SQLDIGIPASS.  If you have a Digipass token set up with RADIATOR 
you can view the current clock drift for it using "digipass.pl info" - I 
seem to recall it was not unusual for tokens to drift by many minutes.

I'm not sure how commonplace TOTP (rather than HOTP) hardware tokens are 
at the moment - which might be why you haven't had reports of problems - 
but I'd be surprised if they were somehow immune to clock drift.  In any 
case, we're probably going to go with Digipass GO-6 tokens for our first 
batch as they're a known quantity and I'm familliar with using Vasco 
tokens with RADIATOR - and we will revisit OAUTH tokens at a later date.

Regards

roy




-- 
Roy Badami
Roboreus Ltd
Third Floor
The Place
175 High Holborn
London WC1V 7AA



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