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.
This enables plug_log to run query methods on the socket in order to
find out useful information to log. I don't expect it's sensible to do
anything else with it.
I'm preparing to be able to ask about the other end of the connection
too, so the first step is to give this data structure a neutral name
that can refer to either. No functional change yet.
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 commit replaces all those fiddly little linking modules
(be_all.c, be_none.c, be_ssh.c etc) with a single source file
controlled by ifdefs, and introduces a function be_list() in
setup.cmake that makes it easy to compile a version of it appropriate
to each application.
This is a net reduction in code according to 'git diff --stat', even
though I've introduced more comments. It also gets rid of another pile
of annoying little source files in the top-level directory that didn't
deserve to take up so much room in 'ls'.
More concretely, doing this has some maintenance advantages.
Centralisation means less to maintain (e.g. n_ui_backends is worked
out once in a way that makes sense everywhere), and also, 'appname'
can now be reliably set per program. Previously, some programs got the
wrong appname due to sharing the same linking module (e.g. Plink had
appname="PuTTY"), which was a latent bug that would have manifested if
I'd wanted to reuse the same string in another context.
One thing I've changed in this rework is that Windows pterm no longer
has the ConPTY backend in its backends[]: it now has an empty one. The
special be_conpty.c module shouldn't really have been there in the
first place: it was used in the very earliest uncommitted drafts of
the ConPTY work, where I was using another method of selecting that
backend, but now that Windows pterm has a dedicated
backend_vt_from_conf() that refers to conpty_backend by name, it has
no need to live in backends[] at all, just as it doesn't have to in
Unix pterm.
Passing an operating-system-specific error code to plug_closing(),
such as errno or GetLastError(), was always a bit weird, given that it
generally had to be handled by cross-platform receiving code in
backends. I had the platform.h implementations #define any error
values that the cross-platform code would have to handle specially,
but that's still not a great system, because it also doesn't leave
freedom to invent error representations of my own that don't
correspond to any OS code. (For example, the ones I just removed from
proxy.h.)
So now, the OS error code is gone from the plug_closing API, and in
its place is a custom enumeration of closure types: normal, error, and
the special case BROKEN_PIPE which is the only OS error code we have
so far needed to handle specially. (All others just mean 'abandon the
connection and print the textual message'.)
Having already centralised the handling of OS error codes in the
previous commit, we've now got a convenient place to add any further
type codes for errors needing special handling: each of Unix
plug_closing_errno(), Windows plug_closing_system_error(), and Windows
plug_closing_winsock_error() can easily grow extra special cases if
need be, and each one will only have to live in one place.
It was totally unused. No implementation of the 'closing' method in a
Plug vtable was checking it for any reason at all, except for
ProxySocket which captured it from its client in order to pass on to
its server (which, perhaps after further iterations of ProxySocket,
would have ended up ignoring it similarly). And every caller of
plug_closing set it to 0 (aka false), except for the one in sshproxy.c
which passed true (but it would have made no difference to anyone).
The comment in network.h refers to a FIXME comment which was in
try_send() when that code was written (see winnet.c in commit
7b0e082700). That FIXME is long gone, replaced by a use of a
toplevel callback. So I think the aim must have been to avoid
re-entrancy when sk_write called try_send which encountered a socket
error and called back to plug_closing - but that's long since fixed by
other means now.
In the case where these socket types are constructed because of a
local proxy command, we do actually have a SockAddr representing the
logical host we were trying to make a connection to. So we might as
well store it in the socket implementation, and then we can include it
in the PLUGLOG_CONNECT_SUCCESS call to make the log message more
informative.
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.
