AirVpn kept crashing, system date was 12/31/1899

[CrankyCat 7]

I had a strange thing happen. The AirVPN client, version 2.4, kept crashing. OpenVpn was still running so I had to kill the process before restarting the AirVPN client. After seeing a strange warning that a certificate was invalid due to the date range, and seeing that is should be valid, I noticed that my system date had been changed to 12/31/1899.

 

I changed the date back but wonder if malicious software could invalidate encryption by intentionally changing the system date to one outside of all certificate valid date ranges. My only warning came from my connection to runbox.com not from anywhere else. I'd expect to see warnings on every web site using https but that didn't happen for some reason.

 

Would a system date in 1899 invalidate AirVPN's encryption and expose my network activity?

[Staff 10118]

  On 9/6/2014 at 7:15 AM, solidstate said:

I changed the date back but wonder if malicious software could invalidate encryption by intentionally changing the system date to one outside of all certificate valid date ranges. My only warning came from my connection to runbox.com not from anywhere else. I'd expect to see warnings on every web site using https but that didn't happen for some reason.

 

Would a system date in 1899 invalidate AirVPN's encryption and expose my network activity?

 

Hello!

 

Our certificates were not valid in 1899 so you will not be able to connect to any VPN server.

 

Kind regards

[CrankyCat 7]

I was already connected when it happened and didn't have a problem reconnecting.

[CrankyCat 7]

Here are the event logs showing the change. It was an hour before I noticed and I was using AirVpn which kept crashing so I kept terminating openvpn and reconnecting. This hasn't happened since though. I don't think this was the bios time just the windows time but it isn't possible to manually set the Windows 7 system time prior to 1980.

 

 

I checked past events and did find one instance where the clock changed to 1899 and then changed back on its own and had run into AirVpn client crashes at that time as well.

At any rate, I'll check the time if the AirVpn client crashes again.

 

gadjservice is Gigabyte's "AdjustService.exe" and their App Center has a setting for "auto time sync" which I have since disabled. So perhaps it's just a glitch and not any type of (intentionally) malicious software.