[Olsr-users] Accepting packets from nodes with very old localtime

[Henning Rogge]

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 7:59 AM, Ben West <(spam-protected)> wrote:
> I've been testing a TP-Link TL-MR3020 running OpenWRT Attitude Adjustment
> v12.09, albeit custom compiled to include the recent release olsrd v0.6.5.4.
> This particular device has no internal hardware clock (not unusual for
> low-cost consumer-grade wifi routers), and it does consistently boot up with
> local time at 1 Jan 1970, which I've found causes other nodes to reject its
> OLSR packets.

If I understand the code right the neighbors of the OLSR node should
forget the last stored timestamp after 30 seconds with no valid
packet.

> Besides that, is it possible to somehow disable timestamp checking for
> incoming OLSR packets?  Or is this a drawback of using the (now presumably
> outdated) secure plugin?

If you disable the timestamps you will be open to replay attacks,
which are a trivial way to disrupt your network.

The alternative would be to use some kind of linklayer-security, it
would offer you practically the same security for OLSR than the secure
plugin, most likely even more.

Henning Rogge

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