DIT, for 'Data-Independent Timing', is a bit you can set in the
processor state on sufficiently new Arm CPUs, which promises that a
long list of instructions will deliberately avoid varying their timing
based on the input register values. Just what you want for keeping
your constant-time crypto primitives constant-time.
As far as I'm aware, no CPU has _yet_ implemented any data-dependent
optimisations, so DIT is a safety precaution against them doing so in
future. It would be embarrassing to be caught without it if a future
CPU does do that, so we now turn on DIT in the PuTTY process state.
I've put a call to the new enable_dit() function at the start of every
main() and WinMain() belonging to a program that might do
cryptography (even testcrypt, in case someone uses it for something!),
and in case I missed one there, also added a second call at the first
moment that any cryptography-using part of the code looks as if it
might become active: when an instance of the SSH protocol object is
configured, when the system PRNG is initialised, and when selecting
any cryptographic authentication protocol in an HTTP or SOCKS proxy
connection. With any luck those precautions between them should ensure
it's on whenever we need it.
Arm's own recommendation is that you should carefully choose the
granularity at which you enable and disable DIT: there's a potential
time cost to turning it on and off (I'm not sure what, but plausibly
something of the order of a pipeline flush), so it's a performance hit
to do it _inside_ each individual crypto function, but if CPUs start
supporting significant data-dependent optimisation in future, then it
will also become a noticeable performance hit to just leave it on
across the whole process. So you'd like to do it somewhere in the
middle: for example, you might turn on DIT once around the whole
process of verifying and decrypting an SSH packet, instead of once for
decryption and once for MAC.
With all respect to that recommendation as a strategy for maximum
performance, I'm not following it here. I turn on DIT at the start of
the PuTTY process, and then leave it on. Rationale:
1. PuTTY is not otherwise a performance-critical application: it's
not likely to max out your CPU for any purpose _other_ than
cryptography. The most CPU-intensive non-cryptographic thing I can
imagine a PuTTY process doing is the complicated computation of
font rendering in the terminal, and that will normally be cached
(you don't recompute each glyph from its outline and hints for
every time you display it).
2. I think a bigger risk lies in accidental side channels from having
DIT turned off when it should have been on. I can imagine lots of
causes for that. Missing a crypto operation in some unswept corner
of the code; confusing control flow (like my coroutine macros)
jumping with DIT clear into the middle of a region of code that
expected DIT to have been set at the beginning; having a reference
counter of DIT requests and getting it out of sync.
In a more sophisticated programming language, it might be possible to
avoid the risk in #2 by cleverness with the type system. For example,
in Rust, you could have a zero-sized type that acts as a proof token
for DIT being enabled (it would be constructed by a function that also
sets DIT, have a Drop implementation that clears DIT, and be !Send so
you couldn't use it in a thread other than the one where DIT was set),
and then you could require all the actual crypto functions to take a
DitToken as an extra parameter, at zero runtime cost. Then "oops I
forgot to set DIT around this piece of crypto" would become a compile
error. Even so, you'd have to take some care with coroutine-structured
code (what happens if a Rust async function yields while holding a DIT
token?) and with nesting (if you have two DIT tokens, you don't want
dropping the inner one to clear DIT while the outer one is still there
to wrongly convince callees that it's set). Maybe in Rust you could
get this all to work reliably. But not in C!
DIT is an optional feature of the Arm architecture, so we must first
test to see if it's supported. This is done the same way as we already
do for the various Arm crypto accelerators: on ELF-based systems,
check the appropriate bit in the 'hwcap' words in the ELF aux vector;
on Mac, look for an appropriate sysctl flag.
On Windows I don't know of a way to query the DIT feature, _or_ of a
way to write the necessary enabling instruction in an MSVC-compatible
way. I've _heard_ that it might not be necessary, because Windows
might just turn on DIT unconditionally and leave it on, in an even
more extreme version of my own strategy. I don't have a source for
that - I heard it by word of mouth - but I _hope_ it's true, because
that would suit me very well! Certainly I can't write code to enable
DIT without knowing (a) how to do it, (b) how to know if it's safe.
Nonetheless, I've put the enable_dit() call in all the right places in
the Windows main programs as well as the Unix and cross-platform code,
so that if I later find out that I _can_ put in an explicit enable of
DIT in some way, I'll only have to arrange to set HAVE_ARM_DIT and
compile the enable_dit() function appropriately.
The immediate usefulness of this is in pterm.exe: when the user uses
-e to specify a command to run in the pterm, we retrieve the command
in Unicode, store it in CONF_remote_cmd as UTF-8, and then in conpty.c
we can extract it in the same form and convert it back to Unicode to
pass losslessly to CreateProcessW. So now non-ACP Unicode works in
that part of the pterm command line.
That's not a failure outcome. The user asked for some information; we
printed it; nothing went wrong. Mission successful, so exit(0)!
I noticed this because it was sitting right next to some of the
usage() calls modified in the previous commit. Those also had the
misfeature of exiting with failure after successfully printing the
help, possibly due to confusion arising from the way that usage() was
_sometimes_ printed on error as well. But pgp_fingerprints() has no
such excuse. That one's just silly.
In the course of debugging the command-line argument refactoring in
previous commits, I found I wasn't quite sure whether PSCP thought I'd
given it too many arguments, or too few, because it didn't print an
error message saying which: it just printed its giant usage message.
Over the last few years I've come to the belief that this is Just
Wrong anyway. Printing the whole of a giant help message should only
be done when the user asked for it: otherwise, print a short and
to-the-point error, and maybe _suggest_ how to get help, but scrolling
everything else off the user's screen is not a good response to a
typo. I wrote this thought up more fully last year:
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/stop-helping/
So, time to practise what I preach! The PuTTY tools now follow the
'Stop helping!' principle. You can get full help by saying --help.
Also, when we do print the help, we now exit(0) rather than exit(1),
because there's no reason to report failure: we successfully did what
the user asked us for.
This is the pathfinding change that proves it's possible for _one_
Conf setting to become Unicode-capable.
That seems like quite a small reward for all the refactoring in the
previous patches this week! But changing over one configuration
setting is enough to get started with: once all the bugs are out of
this one, we can try switching over some more.
Changing the type to CONF_TYPE_STR_AMBI is enough by itself to make
the configuration dialog box write it into Conf as UTF-8, because
conf_editbox_handler automatically checks whether that possibility is
available. However, setting the same Conf entry from the command line
isn't automatic: I had to add code in the handler for the -l
command-line option in cmdline.c.
This commit also doesn't yet handle the _other_ way to specify a
username on the command line: including it as part of the hostname
argument via "putty user@host" or similar. That's more difficult,
because it also requires deciding what to do about UTF-8 in the actual
hostname.
(That looks as if it ought to be possible: Windows should be able to
handle looking up Unicode hostnames if you use GetAddrInfoW() in place
of getaddrinfo(). But plumbing it through everything in between
cmdline.c and windows/network.c is a bigger job than I'm prepared to
do in this proof-of-concept commit.)
This begins the process of enabling our Windows applications to handle
Unicode characters on their command lines which don't fit in the
system code page.
Instead of passing plain strings to cmdline_process_param, we now pass
a partially opaque and platform-specific thing called a CmdlineArg.
This has a method that extracts the argument word as a default-encoded
string, and another one that tries to extract it as UTF-8 (though it
may fail if the UTF-8 isn't available).
On Windows, the command line is now constructed by calling
split_into_argv_w on the Unicode command line returned by
GetCommandLineW(), and the UTF-8 method returns text converted
directly from that wide-character form, not going via the system code
page. So it _can_ include UTF-8 characters that wouldn't have
round-tripped via CP_ACP.
This commit introduces the abstraction and switches over the
cross-platform and Windows argv-handling code to use it, with minimal
functional change. Nothing yet tries to call cmdline_arg_get_utf8().
I say 'cross-platform and Windows' because on the Unix side there's
still a lot of use of plain old argv which I haven't converted. That
would be a much larger project, and isn't currently needed: the
_current_ aim of this abstraction is to get the right things to happen
relating to Unicode on Windows, so for code that doesn't run on
Windows anyway, it's not adding value. (Also there's a tension with
GTK, which wants to talk to standard argv and extract arguments _it_
knows about, so at the very least we'd have to let it munge argv
before importing it into this new system.)
Constructing a FontSpec in platform-independent code is awkward,
because you can't call fontspec_new() outside the platform subdirs
(since its prototype varies per platform). But sometimes you just need
_some_ valid FontSpec, e.g. to put in a Conf that will be used in some
place where you don't actually care about font settings, such as a
purely CLI program.
Both Unix and Windows _have_ an idiom for this, but they're different,
because their FontSpec constructors have different prototypes. The
existing CLI tools have always had per-platform main source files, so
they just use the locally appropriate method of constructing a boring
don't-care FontSpec.
But if you want a _platform-independent_ main source file, such as you
might find in a test program, then that's rather awkward. Better to
have a platform-independent API for making a default FontSpec.
This removes one case from several of the individual tools'
command-line parsers, and moves it into a central place where it will
automatically be supported by any tool containing console.c.
In order to make that not cause a link failure, there's now a
stubs/no-console.c which GUI clients of cmdline.c must include.
This is like the seat-independent nonfatal(), but specifies a Seat,
which allows the GUI dialog box to have the right terminal window as
its parent (if there are multiple ones).
Changed over all the nonfatal() calls in the code base that could be
localised to a Seat, which means all the ones that come up if
something goes horribly wrong in host key storage. To make that
possible, I've added a 'seat' parameter to store_host_key(); it turns
out that all its call sites had one available already.
In several pieces of development recently I've run across the
occasional code block in the middle of a function which suddenly
switched to 2-space indent from this code base's usual 4. I decided I
was tired of it, so I ran the whole code base through a re-indenter,
which made a huge mess, and then manually sifted out the changes that
actually made sense from that pass.
Indeed, this caught quite a few large sections with 2-space indent
level, a couple with 8, and a handful of even weirder things like 3
spaces or 12. This commit fixes them all.
Whenever we successfully send some data to standard output/error,
we're supposed to notify the backend that this has happened, and tell
it how much backlog still remains, by calling backend_unthrottle().
In Unix Plink, the call to backend_unthrottle() was happening on some
but not all calls to try_output(). In particular, it was happening
when we called try_output() as a result of stdout or stderr having
just been reported writable by poll(), but not when we called it from
plink_output() after the backend had just sent us some more data. Of
course that _normally_ works - if you were polling stdout for
writability at all then it's because a previous call had returned
EAGAIN, so that's when you _have_ backlog to dispose of. But it's also
possible, by an accident of timing, that before you get round to doing
that poll, the seat passes you further data and you call try_output()
anyway, and by chance, the blockage has cleared. In that situation,
you end up having cleared your backlog but forgotten to tell the
backend about it - which might mean the backend never unfreezes the
channel or (in 'simple' mode) the entire SSH socket.
A user reported (and I reproduced) that when Plink is compiled on
MacOS, running an interactive session through it and doing
output-intensive activity like scrolling around in htop(1) can quite
easily get it into what turned out to be that stuck state. (I don't
know why MacOS and not any other platform, but since it's a race
condition, that seems like a plausible enough cause of a difference in
timing.)
Also, we were inconsistently computing the backlog size: sometimes it
was the total size of the stdout and stderr bufchains, and sometimes
it was just the size of the one we'd made an effort to empty.
Now the backlog size is consistently stdout+stderr (the same as it is
in Windows Plink), and the call to backend_unthrottle() happens
_inside_ try_output(), so that I don't have to remember it at every
call site.
The text of the host key warnings was replicated in three places: the
Windows rc file, the GTK dialog setup function, and the console.c
shared between both platforms' CLI tools. Now it lives in just one
place, namely ssh/common.c where the rest of the centralised host-key
checking is done, so it'll be easier to adjust the wording in future.
This comes with some extra automation. Paragraph wrapping is no longer
done by hand in any version of these prompts. (Previously we let GTK
do the wrapping on GTK, but on Windows the resource file contained a
bunch of pre-wrapped LTEXT lines, and console.c had pre-wrapped
terminal messages.) And the dialog heights in Windows are determined
automatically based on the amount of stuff in the window.
The main idea of all this is that it'll be easier to set up more
elaborate kinds of host key prompt that deal with certificates (if,
e.g., a server sends us a certified host key which we don't trust the
CA for). But there are side benefits of this refactoring too: each
tool now reliably inserts its own appname in the prompts, and also, on
Windows the entire prompt text is copy-pastable.
Details of implementation: there's a new type SeatDialogText which
holds a set of (type, string) pairs describing the contents of a
prompt. Type codes distinguish ordinary text paragraphs, paragraphs to
be displayed prominently (like key fingerprints), the extra-bold scary
title at the top of the 'host key changed' version of the dialog, and
the various information that lives in the subsidiary 'more info' box.
ssh/common.c constructs this, and passes it to the Seat to present the
actual prompt.
In order to deal with the different UI for answering the prompt, I've
added an extra Seat method 'prompt_descriptions' which returns some
snippets of text to interpolate into the messages. ssh/common.c calls
that while it's still constructing the text, and incorporates the
resulting snippets into the SeatDialogText.
For the moment, this refactoring only affects the host key prompts.
The warnings about outmoded crypto are still done the old-fashioned
way; they probably ought to be similarly refactored to use this new
SeatDialogText system, but it's not immediately critical for the
purpose I have right now.
When the user provides a password on the PuTTY command line, via -pw
or -pwfile, the flag 'tried_once' inside cmdline_get_passwd_input() is
intended to arrange that we only try sending that password once, and
after we've sent it, we don't try again.
But this plays badly with the 'Restart Session' operation. If the
connection is lost and then restarted at user request, we _do_ want to
send that password again!
So this commit moves that static variable out into a small state
structure held by the client of cmdline_get_passwd_input. Each client
can decide how to manage that state itself.
Clients that support 'Restart Session' - i.e. just GUI PuTTY itself -
will initialise the state at the same time as instantiating the
backend, so that every time the session is restarted, we return
to (correctly) believing that we _haven't_ yet tried the password
provided on the command line.
But clients that don't support 'Restart Session' - i.e. Plink and file
transfer tools - can do the same thing that cmdline.c was doing
before: just keep the state in a static variable.
This also means that the GUI login tools will now retain the
command-line password in memory, whereas previously they'd have wiped
it out once it was used. But the other tools will still wipe and free
the password, because I've also added a 'bool restartable' flag to
cmdline_get_passwd_input to let it know when it _is_ allowed to do
that.
In the GUI tools, I don't see any way to get round that, because if
the session is restarted you _have_ to still have the password to use
again. (And you can't infer that that will never happen from the
CONF_close_on_exit setting, because that too could be changed in
mid-session.) On the other hand, I think it's not all that worrying,
because the use of either -pw or -pwfile means that a persistent copy
of your password is *already* stored somewhere, so another one isn't
too big a stretch.
(Due to the change of -pw policy in 0.77, the effect of this bug was
that an attempt to reconnect in a session set up this way would lead
to "Configured password was not accepted". In 0.76, the failure mode
was different: PuTTY would interactively prompt for the password,
having wiped it out of memory after it was used the first time round.)
Correcting a source file name in the docs just now reminded me that
I've seen a lot of outdated source file names elsewhere in the code,
due to all the reorganisation since we moved to cmake. Here's a giant
pass of trying to make them all accurate again.
All the seat functions that request an interactive prompt of some kind
to the user - both the main seat_get_userpass_input and the various
confirmation dialogs for things like host keys - were using a simple
int return value, with the general semantics of 0 = "fail", 1 =
"proceed" (and in the case of seat_get_userpass_input, answers to the
prompts were provided), and -1 = "request in progress, wait for a
callback".
In this commit I change all those functions' return types to a new
struct called SeatPromptResult, whose primary field is an enum
replacing those simple integer values.
The main purpose is that the enum has not three but _four_ values: the
"fail" result has been split into 'user abort' and 'software abort'.
The distinction is that a user abort occurs as a result of an
interactive UI action, such as the user clicking 'cancel' in a dialog
box or hitting ^D or ^C at a terminal password prompt - and therefore,
there's no need to display an error message telling the user that the
interactive operation has failed, because the user already knows,
because they _did_ it. 'Software abort' is from any other cause, where
PuTTY is the first to know there was a problem, and has to tell the
user.
We already had this 'user abort' vs 'software abort' distinction in
other parts of the code - the SSH backend has separate termination
functions which protocol layers can call. But we assumed that any
failure from an interactive prompt request fell into the 'user abort'
category, which is not true. A couple of examples: if you configure a
host key fingerprint in your saved session via the SSH > Host keys
pane, and the server presents a host key that doesn't match it, then
verify_ssh_host_key would report that the user had aborted the
connection, and feel no need to tell the user what had gone wrong!
Similarly, if a password provided on the command line was not
accepted, then (after I fixed the semantics of that in the previous
commit) the same wrong handling would occur.
So now, those Seat prompt functions too can communicate whether the
user or the software originated a connection abort. And in the latter
case, we also provide an error message to present to the user. Result:
in those two example cases (and others), error messages should no
longer go missing.
Implementation note: to avoid the hassle of having the error message
in a SeatPromptResult being a dynamically allocated string (and hence,
every recipient of one must always check whether it's non-NULL and
free it on every exit path, plus being careful about copying the
struct around), I've instead arranged that the structure contains a
function pointer and a couple of parameters, so that the string form
of the message can be constructed on demand. That way, the only users
who need to free it are the ones who actually _asked_ for it in the
first place, which is a much smaller set.
(This is one of the rare occasions that I regret not having C++'s
extra features available in this code base - a unique_ptr or
shared_ptr to a string would have been just the thing here, and the
compiler would have done all the hard work for me of remembering where
to insert the frees!)
When I wanted to append an ordinary C string to a BinarySink, without
any prefix length field or suffix terminator, I was using the idiom
put_datapl(bs, ptrlen_from_asciz(string));
but I've finally decided that's too cumbersome, and it deserves a
shorter name. put_dataz(bs, string) now does the same thing - in fact
it's a macro expanding to exactly the above.
While I'm at it, I've also added put_datalit(), which is the same
except that it expects a C string literal (and will enforce that at
compile time, via PTRLEN_LITERAL which it calls in turn). You can use
that where possible to avoid the run-time cost of the strlen.
(TL;DR: to suppress redundant 'Press Return to begin session' prompts
in between hops of a jump-host configuration, in Plink.)
This new query method directly asks the Seat the question: is the same
stream of input used to provide responses to interactive login
prompts, and the session input provided after login concludes?
It's used to suppress the last-ditch anti-spoofing defence in Plink of
interactively asking 'Access granted. Press Return to begin session',
on the basis that any such spoofing attack works by confusing the user
about what's a legit login prompt before the session begins and what's
sent by the server after the main session begins - so if those two
things take input from different places, the user can't be confused.
This doesn't change the existing behaviour of Plink, which was already
suppressing the antispoof prompt in cases where its standard input was
redirected from something other than a terminal. But previously it was
doing it within the can_set_trust_status() seat query, and I've now
moved it out into a separate query function.
The reason why these need to be separate is for SshProxy, which needs
to give an unusual combination of answers when run inside Plink. For
can_set_trust_status(), it needs to return whatever the parent Seat
returns, so that all the login prompts for a string of proxy
connections in session will be antispoofed the same way. But you only
want that final 'Access granted' prompt to happen _once_, after all
the proxy connection setup phases are done, because up until then
you're still in the safe hands of PuTTY itself presenting an unbroken
sequence of legit login prompts (even if they come from a succession
of different servers). Hence, SshProxy unconditionally returns 'no' to
the query of whether it has a single mixed input stream, because
indeed, it never does - for purposes of session input it behaves like
an always-redirected Plink, no matter what kind of real Seat it ends
up sending its pre-session login prompts to.
Previously, SSH authentication banners were displayed by calling the
ordinary seat_output function, and passing it a special value in the
SeatOutputType enumeration indicating an auth banner.
The awkwardness of this was already showing a little in SshProxy's
implementation of seat_output, where it had to check for that special
value and do totally different things for SEAT_OUTPUT_AUTH_BANNER and
everything else. Further work in that area is going to make it more
and more awkward if I keep the two output systems unified.
So let's split them up. Now, Seat has separate output() and banner()
methods, which each implementation can override differently if it
wants to.
All the 'end user' Seat implementations use the centralised
implementation function nullseat_banner_to_stderr(), which turns
banner text straight back into SEAT_OUTPUT_STDERR and passes it on to
seat_output. So I didn't have to tediously implement a boring version
of this function in GTK, Windows GUI, consoles, file transfer etc.
Previously, checking the host key against the persistent cache managed
by the storage.h API was done as part of the seat_verify_ssh_host_key
method, i.e. separately by each Seat.
Now that check is done by verify_ssh_host_key(), which is a new
function in ssh/common.c that centralises all the parts of host key
checking that don't need an interactive prompt. It subsumes the
previous verify_ssh_manual_host_key() that checked against the Conf,
and it does the check against the storage API that each Seat was
previously doing separately. If it can't confirm or definitively
reject the host key by itself, _then_ it calls out to the Seat, once
an interactive prompt is definitely needed.
The main point of doing this is so that when SshProxy forwards a Seat
call from the proxy SSH connection to the primary Seat, it won't print
an announcement of which connection is involved unless it's actually
going to do something interactive. (Not that we're printing those
announcements _yet_ anyway, but this is a piece of groundwork that
works towards doing so.)
But while I'm at it, I've also taken the opportunity to clean things
up a bit by renaming functions sensibly. Previously we had three very
similarly named functions verify_ssh_manual_host_key(), SeatVtable's
'verify_ssh_host_key' method, and verify_host_key() in storage.h. Now
the Seat method is called 'confirm' rather than 'verify' (since its
job is now always to print an interactive prompt, so it looks more
like the other confirm_foo methods), and the storage.h function is
called check_stored_host_key(), which goes better with store_host_key
and avoids having too many functions with similar names. And the
'manual' function is subsumed into the new centralised code, so
there's now just *one* host key function with 'verify' in the name.
Several functions are reindented in this commit. Best viewed with
whitespace changes ignored.
The current 'displayname' field is designed for presenting in the
config UI, so it starts with a capital letter even when it's not a
proper noun. If I want to name the backend in the middle of a
sentence, I'll need a version that starts with lowercase where
appropriate.
The old field is renamed displayname_tc, to avoid ambiguity.
Similarly to cmdgen's passphrase options, this replaces the password
on the command line with a filename to read the password out of, which
means it can't show up in 'ps' or the Windows task manager.
The jump host system ought really to be treating SSH authentication
banners as a distinct thing from the standard-error session output, so
that the former can be presented to the user in the same way as the
auth banner for the main session.
This change converts the 'bool is_stderr' parameter of seat_output()
into an enumerated type with three values. For the moment, stderr and
banners are treated the same, but the plan is for that to change.
The system for handling seat_get_userpass_input has always been
structured differently between GUI PuTTY and CLI tools like Plink.
In the CLI tools, password input is read directly from the OS
terminal/console device by console_get_userpass_input; this means that
you need to ensure the same terminal input data _hasn't_ already been
consumed by the main event loop and sent on to the backend. This is
achieved by the backend_sendok() method, which tells the event loop
when the backend has finished issuing password prompts, and hence,
when it's safe to start passing standard input to backend_send().
But in the GUI tools, input generated by the terminal window has
always been sent straight to backend_send(), regardless of whether
backend_sendok() says it wants it. So the terminal-based
implementation of username and password prompts has to work by
consuming input data that had _already_ been passed to the backend -
hence, any backend that needs to do that must keep its input on a
bufchain, and pass that bufchain to seat_get_userpass_input.
It's awkward that these two totally different systems coexist in the
first place. And now that SSH proxying needs to present interactive
prompts of its own, it's clear which one should win: the CLI style is
the Right Thing. So this change reworks the GUI side of the mechanism
to be more similar: terminal data now goes into a queue in the Ldisc,
and is not sent on to the backend until the backend says it's ready
for it via backend_sendok(). So terminal-based userpass prompts can
now consume data directly from that queue during the connection setup
stage.
As a result, the 'bufchain *' parameter has vanished from all the
userpass_input functions (both the official implementations of the
Seat trait method, and term_get_userpass_input() to which some of
those implementations delegate). The only function that actually used
that bufchain, namely term_get_userpass_input(), now instead reads
from the ldisc's input queue via a couple of new Ldisc functions.
(Not _trivial_ functions, since input buffered by Ldisc can be a
mixture of raw bytes and session specials like SS_EOL! The input queue
inside Ldisc is a bufchain containing a fiddly binary encoding that
can represent an arbitrary interleaving of those things.)
This greatly simplifies the calls to seat_get_userpass_input in
backends, which now don't have to mess about with passing their own
user_input bufchain around, or toggling their want_user_input flag
back and forth to request data to put on to that bufchain.
But the flip side is that now there has to be some _other_ method for
notifying the terminal when there's more input to be consumed during
an interactive prompt, and for notifying the backend when prompt input
has finished so that it can proceed to the next stage of the protocol.
This is done by a pair of extra callbacks: when more data is put on to
Ldisc's input queue, it triggers a call to term_get_userpass_input,
and when term_get_userpass_input finishes, it calls a callback
function provided in the prompts_t.
Therefore, any use of a prompts_t which *might* be asynchronous must
fill in the latter callback when setting up the prompts_t. In SSH, the
callback is centralised into a common PPL helper function, which
reinvokes the same PPL's process_queue coroutine; in rlogin we have to
set it up ourselves.
I'm sorry for this large and sprawling patch: I tried fairly hard to
break it up into individually comprehensible sub-patches, but I just
couldn't tease out any part of it that would stand sensibly alone.
This is called by the backend to notify the Seat that the connection
has progressed to the point where the main session channel (i.e. the
thing that would typically correspond to the client's stdin/stdout)
has been successfully set up.
The only Seat that implements this method nontrivially is the one in
SshProxy, which uses it as an indication that the proxied connection
to the remote host has succeeded, and sends the
PLUGLOG_CONNECT_SUCCESS notification to its own Plug.
Hence, the only backends that need to implement it at the moment are
the two SSH-shaped backends (SSH proper and bare-connection / psusan).
For other backends, it's not always obvious what 'main session
channel' would even mean, or whether it means anything very useful; so
I've also introduced a backend flag indicating whether the backend is
expecting to call that method at all, so as not to have to spend
pointless effort on defining an arbitrary meaning for it in other
contexts.
So a lot of this patch is just introducing the new method and putting
its trivial do-nothing implementation into all the existing Seat
methods. The interesting parts happen in ssh/mainchan.c (which
actually calls it), and sshproxy.c (which does something useful in
response).
This complicates the API in one sense (more separate functions), but
in another sense, simplifies it (each function does something
simpler). When I start putting one Seat in front of another during SSH
proxying, the latter will be more important - in particular, it means
you can find out _whether_ a seat can support changing trust status
without having to actually attempt a destructive modification.
This is used to notify the Seat that some data has been cleared from
the backend's outgoing data buffer. In other words, it notifies the
Seat that it might be worth calling backend_sendbuffer() again.
We've never needed this before, because until now, Seats have always
been the 'main program' part of the application, meaning they were
also in control of the event loop. So they've been able to call
backend_sendbuffer() proactively, every time they go round the event
loop, instead of having to wait for a callback.
But now, the SSH proxy is the first example of a Seat without
privileged access to the event loop, so it has no way to find out that
the backend's sendbuffer has got smaller. And without that, it can't
pass that notification on to plug_sent, to unblock in turn whatever
the proxied connection might have been waiting to send.
In fact, before this commit, sshproxy.c never called plug_sent at all.
As a result, large data uploads over an SSH jump host would hang
forever as soon as the outgoing buffer filled up for the first time:
the main backend (to which sshproxy.c was acting as a Socket) would
carefully stop filling up the buffer, and then never receive the call
to plug_sent that would cause it to start again.
The new callback is ignored everywhere except in sshproxy.c. It might
be a good idea to remove backend_sendbuffer() entirely and convert all
previous uses of it into non-empty implementations of this callback,
so that we've only got one system; but for the moment, I haven't done
that.
Suggested by Manfred Kaiser, who also wrote most of this patch
(although outlying parts, like documentation and SSH-1 support, are by
me).
This is a second line of defence against the kind of spoofing attacks
in which a malicious or compromised SSH server rushes the client
through the userauth phase of SSH without actually requiring any auth
inputs (passwords or signatures or whatever), and then at the start of
the connection phase it presents something like a spoof prompt,
intended to be taken for part of userauth by the user but in fact with
some more sinister purpose.
Our existing line of defence against this is the trust sigil system,
and as far as I know, that's still working. This option allows a bit of
extra defence in depth: if you don't expect your SSH server to
trivially accept authentication in the first place, then enabling this
option will cause PuTTY to disconnect if it unexpectedly does so,
without the user having to spot the presence or absence of a fiddly
little sigil anywhere.
Several types of authentication count as 'trivial'. The obvious one is
the SSH-2 "none" method, which clients always try first so that the
failure message will tell them what else they can try, and which a
server can instead accept in order to authenticate you unconditionally.
But there are two other ways to do it that we know of: one is to run
keyboard-interactive authentication and send an empty INFO_REQUEST
packet containing no actual prompts for the user, and another even
weirder one is to send USERAUTH_SUCCESS in response to the user's
preliminary *offer* of a public key (instead of sending the usual PK_OK
to request an actual signature from the key).
This new option detects all of those, by clearing the 'is_trivial_auth'
flag only when we send some kind of substantive authentication response
(be it a password, a k-i prompt response, a signature, or a GSSAPI
token). So even if there's a further path through the userauth maze we
haven't spotted, that somehow avoids sending anything substantive, this
strategy should still pick it up.
This notifies the Seat that the entire backend session has finished
and closed its network connection - or rather, that it _might_ have
done, and that the frontend should check backend_connected() if it
wasn't planning to do so already.
The existing Seat implementations haven't needed this: the GUI ones
don't actually need to do anything specific when the network
connection goes away, and the CLI ones deal with it by being in charge
of their own event loop so that they can easily check
backend_connected() at every possible opportunity in any case. But I'm
about to introduce a new Seat implementation that does need to know
this, and doesn't have any other way to get notified of it.
This gets rid of all those annoying 'win', 'ux' and 'gtk' prefixes
which made filenames annoying to type and to tab-complete. Also, as
with my other recent renaming sprees, I've taken the opportunity to
expand and clarify some of the names so that they're not such cryptic
abbreviations.
