WCF Security Exception: Timestamp is invalid because its creation time is in the future

Well, I ran into a real fun bug today that surfaced itself on the user's computer as a "Security Exception see Inner Exception". Upon examining the inner exception, it told me that the message was incorrectly secured. After placing some tracing on the server, I found this error message:

The security timestamp is invalid because its creation time ('11/9/2007 10:37:07 PM') is in the future. Current time is '11/9/2007 10:28:52 PM' and allowed clock skew is '00:05:00'.

After fixing the user's clock, which was roughly 8 minutes fast, everything worked great. The next question is "How do I increase the maximum skew time"? It took a bit of searching to figure out that I need to create a custom binding to change the values. Here is an example of how to do it:

<bindings>
<customBinding>
 <binding name="MaxClockSkewBinding">
     <textMessageEncoding />
     <security authenticationMode="Kerberos">
        <localClientSettings maxClockSkew="00:07:00" />
        <localServiceSettings maxClockSkew="00:07:00" />

       <secureConversationBootstrap />
     </security>
     <httpTransport />
 </binding>
</customBinding>
</bindings>

For more information, see How To: Set a Max Clock Skew on MSDN.


More References:

• Custom Bindings page on MSDN shows the proper way to stack your collection of binding elements.
  
• How To: Create a Custom Binding Using the SecurityBindingElement which shows how to build the a custom binding.