feat: warn when the local clock is far off the homeserver's (#158)

Incident 2026-09-17: a wrong Windows clock broke calls and media keys while
the server answered 200 to everything, with no hint in the UI.

Measurement needs no extra requests and no CORS-exposed headers: every live
event carries origin_server_ts and unsigned.age (our server's now − ts at
response time), so localTimestamp − origin_server_ts is the skew. Only
RoomEvent.Timeline live events count (cache replays have stale age and are
already flagged liveEvent=false by the SDK); the initial network sync
qualifies, so a wrong clock is flagged within seconds of startup. Median of
the last 5 samples, ≥3 needed; warn at |skew| > 30 s, clear below 15 s.

UI: a banner in the sync-status slot — "Your computer's clock is 14 minutes
ahead of the server. Encrypted messages and voice calls will fail until it is
fixed." with a per-OS How-to-fix hint and Dismiss for 24 h — plus the same
line in the call status bar while in a call. Never auto-corrects anything.

Unit-tested (median, hysteresis, stale-age rejection, wording); verified
headless with Playwright's clock skewed +14 min and −3 h (banner, hint,
in-call line, dismiss) and in sync (nothing shown).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PPmy3tPq869XDW4njjVaKA
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-19 12:52:03 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 464951edf4
commit 84c906fe33
7 changed files with 372 additions and 1 deletions
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import { test } from 'node:test';
import assert from 'node:assert/strict';
import {
ClockSkewMonitor,
clockFixHint,
describeSkewVsServer,
detectClockFixPlatform,
formatSkew,
} from './clockSkew';
// A live event received when the local clock is `skew` ms ahead of the server:
// origin_server_ts = T (server clock), age = a, localTimestamp = (T + a + skew) - a.
const feed = (m: ClockSkewMonitor, skew: number, age = 500, t = 1_700_000_000_000) =>
m.sample(t, age, t + skew);
test('needs three samples, then reports the median with direction', () => {
const m = new ClockSkewMonitor();
assert.equal(feed(m, 60_000).skewMs, null);
assert.equal(feed(m, 61_000).skewMs, null);
const s = feed(m, 59_000);
assert.equal(s.skewMs, 60_000);
assert.equal(s.warning, true);
assert.equal(formatSkew(s.skewMs!), '60 seconds ahead');
});
test('one bad sample cannot trip the warning (median) and hysteresis clears only under 15 s', () => {
const m = new ClockSkewMonitor();
feed(m, 1000);
feed(m, 1500);
assert.equal(feed(m, 90_000).warning, false); // outlier
assert.equal(m.getState().skewMs, 1500);
const w = new ClockSkewMonitor();
[40_000, 41_000, 39_000, 40_000, 40_000].forEach((s) => feed(w, s));
assert.equal(w.getState().warning, true);
// drifting down to 20 s: still >= 15 s → stays on
[20_000, 20_000, 20_000, 20_000, 20_000].forEach((s) => feed(w, s));
assert.equal(w.getState().warning, true);
[10_000, 10_000, 10_000, 10_000, 10_000].forEach((s) => feed(w, s));
assert.equal(w.getState().warning, false);
});
test('stale or missing age is ignored (cache replay must not read as skew)', () => {
const m = new ClockSkewMonitor();
const t = 1_700_000_000_000;
m.sample(t, undefined, t + 3_600_000);
m.sample(t, 40 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000, t + 3_600_000);
m.sample(t, -5, t);
assert.equal(m.getState().skewMs, null);
});
test('subscribe fires on change only; reset clears', () => {
const m = new ClockSkewMonitor();
const seen: (number | null)[] = [];
m.subscribe((s) => seen.push(s.skewMs));
feed(m, -120_000);
feed(m, -120_000);
feed(m, -120_000);
feed(m, -120_000);
assert.deepEqual(seen, [-120_000]);
assert.equal(formatSkew(-120_000), '2 minutes behind');
m.reset();
assert.deepEqual(seen, [-120_000, null]);
});
test('formatSkew picks a sensible unit', () => {
assert.equal(formatSkew(45_000), '45 seconds ahead');
assert.equal(formatSkew(-14 * 60_000), '14 minutes behind');
assert.equal(formatSkew(3 * 3_600_000), '3 hours ahead');
assert.equal(formatSkew(2 * 86_400_000), '2 days ahead');
assert.equal(describeSkewVsServer(-3 * 3_600_000), '3 hours behind the server');
assert.equal(describeSkewVsServer(14 * 60_000), '14 minutes ahead of the server');
});
test('platform hint', () => {
assert.equal(detectClockFixPlatform('Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)'), 'windows');
assert.equal(
detectClockFixPlatform('Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_0 like Mac OS X)'),
'ios',
);
assert.equal(detectClockFixPlatform('Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 14_0)'), 'mac');
assert.match(clockFixHint('windows'), /Sync now/);
});