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.
marshal.h now provides a macro put_fmt() which allows you to write
arbitrary printf-formatted data to an arbitrary BinarySink.
We already had this facility for strbufs in particular, in the form of
strbuf_catf(). That was able to take advantage of knowing the inner
structure of a strbuf to minimise memory allocation (it would snprintf
directly into the strbuf's existing buffer if possible). For a general
black-box BinarySink we can't do that, so instead we dupvprintf into a
temporary buffer.
For consistency, I've removed strbuf_catf, and converted all uses of
it into the new put_fmt - and I've also added an extra vtable method
in the BinarySink API, so that put_fmt can still use strbuf_catf's
more efficient memory management when talking to a strbuf, and fall
back to the simpler strategy when that's not available.
I'd forgotten that the text-only branch of seat_antispoof_msg()
constructs a string from its input in the expectation that it's a
one-line message. So it was a mistake to put a \n at the start of the
string in interactor_announce() to get a blank line first.
Now interactor_announce() makes an extra call to seat_antispoof_msg to
show its blank line, and seat_antispoof_msg itself handles the
blank-line case specially.
All this Interactor business has been gradually working towards being
able to inform the user _which_ network connection is currently
presenting them with a password prompt (or whatever), in situations
where more than one of them might be, such as an SSH connection being
used as a proxy for another SSH connection when neither one has
one-touch login configured.
At some point, we have to arrange that any attempt to do a user
interaction during connection setup - be it a password prompt, a host
key confirmation dialog, or just displaying an SSH login banner -
makes it clear which host it's come from. That's going to mean calling
some kind of announcement function before doing any of those things.
But there are several of those functions in the Seat API, and calls to
them are scattered far and wide across the SSH backend. (And not even
just there - the Rlogin backend also uses seat_get_userpass_input).
How can we possibly make sure we don't forget a vital call site on
some obscure little-tested code path, and leave the user confused in
just that one case which nobody might notice for years?
Today I thought of a trick to solve that problem. We can use the C
type system to enforce it for us!
The plan is: we invent a new struct type which contains nothing but a
'Seat *'. Then, for every Seat method which does a thing that ought to
be clearly identified as relating to a particular Interactor, we
adjust the API for that function to take the new struct type where it
previously took a plain 'Seat *'. Or rather - doing less violence to
the existing code - we only need to adjust the API of the dispatch
functions inline in putty.h.
How does that help? Because the way you _get_ one of these
struct-wrapped Seat pointers is by calling interactor_announce() on
your Interactor, which will in turn call interactor_get_seat(), and
wrap the returned pointer into one of these structs.
The effect is that whenever the SSH (or Rlogin) code wants to call one
of those particular Seat methods, it _has_ to call
interactor_announce() just beforehand, which (once I finish all of
this) will make sure the user is aware of who is presenting the prompt
or banner or whatever. And you can't forget to call it, because if you
don't call it, then you just don't have a struct of the right type to
give to the Seat method you wanted to call!
(Of course, there's nothing stopping code from _deliberately_ taking a
Seat * it already has and wrapping it into the new struct. In fact
SshProxy has to do that, in order to forward these requests up the
chain of Seats. But the point is that you can't do it _by accident_,
just by forgetting to make a vital function call - when you do that,
you _know_ you're doing it on purpose.)
No functional change: the new interactor_announce() function exists,
and the type-system trick ensures it's called in all the right places,
but it doesn't actually _do_ anything yet.
It doesn't actually do anything specific to the userauth layer; it's
just a helper function that deals with the mechanics of printing an
unspoofable message on various kinds of front end, and the only
parameters it needs are a Seat and a message.
Currently, it's used for 'here is the start/end of the server banner'
only. But it's also got all the right functionality to be used for the
(still missing) messages about which proxy SSH server the next set of
login prompts are going to refer to.
