How come when I duckduckgo “what time is it”, that sometimes my actual time shows up instead of a random time?
the last hop is probably on the same timezone as you, see circuit path on Tor Browser.
Checking the time is not a reliable option because many people can be on the same timezone, but few people can be on the same ip. Check your IP on https://check.torproject.org/api/ip
With boot clock randomization and sdwdate saying successful, shouldn’t it always be a random time?
Boot clock randomization is only for the boot, to change between and and 180 seconds Boot Clock Randomization - Kicksecure . It is run during boot, before sdwdate starts.
With boot clock randomization and sdwdate saying successful, shouldn’t it always be a random time?
No. Read sdwdate: Secure Distributed Web Date
In sdwdate clock randomization was enabled by default for many versions. From sdwdate version 11.8
and above it needs to be opt-in, which is only done inside Kicksecure ™ through package anon-apps-config
/etc/sdwdate.d/40_anon-apps-config.conf
RANDOMIZE_TIME=true
. sdwdate version 11.8
does not enable clock randomization by default for non-Kicksecure ™ users.
Sdwdate is used to set the system clock, the randomization is used to ask the pools available via onion services and the median time of the results is used, as far as I understood from the docs.
At random intervals, sdwdate connects to a variety of webservers and extracts the time stamps from http headers (see: RFC 2616
).