Workstation time sync for time-sensitive apps

I found several older posts about system time sync and a recommendation here. My KVM setting for current Whonix Workstation is utc (no random offset) and sdwdate is keeping the VM’s clock in sync.

The problem is the VM is constantly late so the time-sensitive app running on Workstation reports peers’ time is in the future. It’s not by a “lot” (<2s).

This screenshot shows Workstation guest vs. KVM Host:

image

Tor latency seems to be around 200ms - not sure if that’s a factor here.

I looked at chrony which was discussed years ago, but it seems to conflict with quite a few Whonix-related packages so I guess installing it could break a lot of things.

Any other option to keep Workstation’s system time deviate less, say <0.5s?

There are none except disabling.

sdwdate: Secure Distributed Web Date chapter Disable Autostart in Kicksecure wiki

(Whonix is based on Kicksecure.)

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Thank you.

Is PTP considered a security risk?

I’ve just read about issues with other approaches but haven’t found anything about security or privacy risks of using kvmclock / PTP module.

Probably won’t work. A short search says it used UDP and that’s unsupported by Tor.
(Tor - Whonix chapter UDP in Whonix wiki)

Is disabled on purpose. The rationale is to unlink host and VM clocks.

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