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!)
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.
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.
Now that the SSH backend's user_input bufchain is no longer needed for
handling userpass input, it doesn't have to be awkwardly shared
between all the packet protocol layers any more. So we can turn the
want_user_input and got_user_input methods of PacketProtocolLayer into
methods of ConnectionLayer, and then only the two connection layers
have to bother implementing them, or store a pointer to the bufchain
they read from.
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.
I did a horrible thing with a list macro which builds up a 256-bit
bitmap of known SSH-2 message types at compile time, by means of
evaluating a conditional expression per known message type and per
bitmap word which boils down to (in pseudocode)
(shift count in range ? 1 << shift count : 0)
I think this is perfectly valid C. If the shift count is out of range,
then the use of the << operator in the true branch of the ?: would
have undefined behaviour if it were executed - but that's OK, because
in that situation, the safe false branch is executed instead.
But when the whole thing is a compile-time evaluated constant
expression, the compiler can prove statically that the << in the true
branch is an out-of-range shift, and at least some compilers will warn
about it verbosely. The same compiler *could* also prove statically
that that branch isn't taken, and use that to suppress the warning -
but at least clang does not.
The solution is the same one I used in shift_right_by_one_word and
shift_left_by_one_word in mpint.c: inside the true branch, nest a
second conditional expression which coerces the shift count to always
be in range, by setting it to 0 if it's not. This doesn't affect the
output, because the only cases in which the output of the true branch
is altered by this transformation are the ones in which the true
branch wasn't taken anyway.
So this change should make no difference to the output of this macro
construction, but it suppresses about 350 pointless warnings from
clang.
This clears up another large pile of clutter at the top level, and in
the process, allows me to rename source files to things that don't all
have that annoying 'ssh' prefix at the top.