This was mildly fiddly because there's a single vtable structure that
implements two distinct interface types, one for compression and one
for decompression - and I have actually confused them before now
(commit d4304f1b7), so I think it's important to make them actually be
separate types!
The interchangeable system of SSH-1 ciphers previously followed the
same pattern as the backends and the public-key algorithms, in that
all the clients would maintain two separate pointers, one to the
vtable and the other to the individual instance / context. Now I've
merged them, just as I did with those other two, so that you only cart
around a single pointer, which has a vtable pointer inside it and a
type distinguishing it from an instance of any of the other
interchangeable sets of algorithms.
Now when we construct a packet containing sensitive data, we just set
a field saying '... and make it take up at least this much space, to
disguise its true size', and nothing in the rest of the system worries
about that flag until ssh2bpp.c acts on it.
Also, I've changed the strategy for doing the padding. Previously, we
were following the real packet with an SSH_MSG_IGNORE to make up the
size. But that was only a partial defence: it works OK against passive
traffic analysis, but an attacker proxying the TCP stream and
dribbling it out one byte at a time could still have found out the
size of the real packet by noting when the dribbled data provoked a
response. Now I put the SSH_MSG_IGNORE _first_, which should defeat
that attack.
But that in turn doesn't work when we're doing compression, because we
can't predict the compressed sizes accurately enough to make that
strategy sensible. Fortunately, compression provides an alternative
strategy anyway: if we've got zlib turned on when we send one of these
sensitive packets, then we can pad out the compressed zlib data as
much as we like by adding empty RFC1951 blocks (effectively chaining
ZLIB_PARTIAL_FLUSHes). So both strategies should now be dribble-proof.
I think ever since commit 679fa90df last month, PuTTY has been
forgetting to free any of its outgoing packet structures after turning
them into their encrypted wire format. And apparently no users of the
development snapshots have noticed - including me!
sshbpp.h now defines a classoid that encapsulates both directions of
an SSH binary packet protocol - that is, a system for reading a
bufchain of incoming data and turning it into a stream of PktIn, and
another system for taking a PktOut and turning it into data on an
outgoing bufchain.
The state structure in each of those files contains everything that
used to be in the 'rdpkt2_state' structure and its friends, and also
quite a lot of bits and pieces like cipher and MAC states that used to
live in the main Ssh structure.
One minor effect of this layer separation is that I've had to extend
the packet dispatch table by one, because the BPP layer can no longer
directly trigger sending of SSH_MSG_UNIMPLEMENTED for a message too
short to have a type byte. Instead, I extend the PktIn type field to
use an out-of-range value to encode that, and the easiest way to make
that trigger an UNIMPLEMENTED message is to have the dispatch table
contain an entry for it.
(That's a system that may come in useful again - I was also wondering
about inventing a fake type code to indicate network EOF, so that that
could be propagated through the layers and be handled by whichever one
currently knew best how to respond.)
I've also moved the packet-censoring code into its own pair of files,
partly because I was going to want to do that anyway sooner or later,
and mostly because it's called from the BPP code, and the SSH-2
version in particular has to be called from both the main SSH-2 BPP
and the bare unencrypted protocol used for connection sharing. While I
was at it, I took the opportunity to merge the outgoing and incoming
censor functions, so that the parts that were common between them
(e.g. CHANNEL_DATA messages look the same in both directions) didn't
need to be repeated.
