Previously we were doing 5 concurrent requests, thus it was
safe to tolerate 2 errors. With 4 it doesn't make sense to use
only 2 responses, because even if 1 of them is skewed - we will set
incorrect time.
This change adds adds an ability to use different source of time for whisper:
when envelope is created it is used to set expiry
to track when envelope needs to be expired
This time is then used to check validity of the envelope when it is received. Currently If we receive an envelope that is sent from future - peer will get disconnected. If envelope that was received has an expiry less then now it will be simply dropped, if expiry is less than now + 10*2 seconds peer will get dropped.
So, it is clear that whisper depends on time. And any time we get a skew with peers that is > 20s reliability will be grealy reduced.
In this change another source of time for whisper will be used. This time source will use ntp servers from pool.ntp.org to compute offset. When whisper queries time - this offset will be added/substracted from current time.
Query is executed every 2 mins, queries 5 different servers, cut offs min and max and the computes mean value. pool.ntp.org is resolved to different servers and according to documentation you will rarely hit the same.
Closes: #687
frank
Andrea Maria Piana
Pedro Pombeiro
Pedro Pombeiro
Dmitry
Dmitry Shulyak
Adrià Cidre
Adam Babik
Ivan Daniluk