I only recently found out that OpenSSH defined their own protocol IDs
for AES-GCM, defined to work the same as the standard ones except that
they fixed the semantics for how you select the linked cipher+MAC pair
during key exchange.
(RFC 5647 defines protocol ids for AES-GCM in both the cipher and MAC
namespaces, and requires that you MUST select both or neither - but
this contradicts the selection policy set out in the base SSH RFCs,
and there's no discussion of how you resolve a conflict between them!
OpenSSH's answer is to do it the same way ChaCha20-Poly1305 works,
because that will ensure the two suites don't fight.)
People do occasionally ask us for this linked cipher/MAC pair, and now
I know it's actually feasible, I've implemented it, including a pair
of vector implementations for x86 and Arm using their respective
architecture extensions for multiplying polynomials over GF(2).
Unlike ChaCha20-Poly1305, I've kept the cipher and MAC implementations
in separate objects, with an arm's-length link between them that the
MAC uses when it needs to encrypt single cipher blocks to use as the
inputs to the MAC algorithm. That enables the cipher and the MAC to be
independently selected from their hardware-accelerated versions, just
in case someone runs on a system that has polynomial multiplication
instructions but not AES acceleration, or vice versa.
There's a fourth implementation of the GCM MAC, which is a pure
software implementation of the same algorithm used in the vectorised
versions. It's too slow to use live, but I've kept it in the code for
future testing needs, and because it's a convenient place to dump my
design comments.
The vectorised implementations are fairly crude as far as optimisation
goes. I'm sure serious x86 _or_ Arm optimisation engineers would look
at them and laugh. But GCM is a fast MAC compared to HMAC-SHA-256
(indeed compared to HMAC-anything-at-all), so it should at least be
good enough to use. And we've got a working version with some tests
now, so if someone else wants to improve them, they can.
If the function name (or expression) in a function call or declaration
is itself so long that even the first argument doesn't fit after it on
the same line, or if that would leave so little space that it would be
silly to try to wrap all the run-on lines into a tall thin column,
then I used to do this
ludicrously_long_function_name
(arg1, arg2, arg3);
and now prefer this
ludicrously_long_function_name(
arg1, arg2, arg3);
I picked up the habit from Python, where the latter idiom is required
by Python's syntactic significance of newlines (you can write the
former if you use a backslash-continuation, but pretty much everyone
seems to agree that that's much uglier). But I've found it works well
in C as well: it makes it more obvious that the previous line is
incomplete, it gives you a tiny bit more space to wrap the following
lines into (the old idiom indents the _third_ line one space beyond
the second), and I generally turn out to agree with the knock-on
indentation decisions made by at least Emacs if you do it in the
middle of a complex expression. Plus, of course, using the _same_
idiom between C and Python means less state-switching.
So, while I'm making annoying indentation changes in general, this
seems like a good time to dig out all the cases of the old idiom in
this code, and switch them over to the new.
My aim has always been to have those back-dented by 2 spaces (half an
indent level) compared to the statements around them, so that in
particular switch statements have distinct alignment for the
statement, the cases and the interior code without consuming two whole
indent levels.
This patch sweeps up all the violations of that principle found by my
bulk-reindentation exercise.
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.
It's self-contained enough not to really need to live in dialog.c as a
set of static functions. Also, moving it means we can isolate the
implementation details - which also makes it easy to change them.
One such change is that I've added the ability to bake a context
pointer into the dialog - unused so far, but it will be shortly.
(Also, while I'm here, renamed the functions so they sound more as if
they're adding features than working around bugs - not to mention not
imputing mental illness to the usual versions.)
All the fiddly business where you have to check that a thing exists,
make sure of its type, find its size, allocate some memory, and then
read it again properly (or, alternatively, loop round dealing with
ERROR_MORE_DATA) just doesn't belong at every call site. It's crying
out to be moved out into some separate utility functions that present
a more ergonomic API, so that the code that decides _which_ Registry
entries to read and what to do with them can concentrate on that.
So I've written a fresh set of registry API wrappers in windows/utils,
and simplified windows/storage.c as a result. The jump-list handling
code in particular is almost legible now!
Using a new screenshot-taking module I just added in windows/utils,
these new options allow me to start up one of the tools with
demonstration window contents and automatically save a .BMP screenshot
to disk. This will allow me to keep essentially the same set of demo
images and update them easily to keep pace with the current appearance
of the real tools as PuTTY - and Windows itself - both evolve.
Now it can be called from places other than Pageant's WinMain(). In
particular, the attempt to make a security descriptor in
lock_interprocess_mutex() is gated on it.
In return, however, I've tightened up the semantics. In normal PuTTY
builds that aren't trying to support pre-NT systems, the function
*unconditionally* returns true, on the grounds that we don't expect to
target any system that doesn't support the security APIs, and if
someone manages to contrive one anyway - or, more likely, if we some
day introduce a bug in our loading of the security API functions -
then this safety catch should make Pageant less likely to accidentally
fall back to 'never mind, just run in insecure mode'.
This fixes a load-time failure on versions of Windows too old to have
that function in kernel32.dll.
We use it to determine whether a file was safe to overwrite in the
context of PuTTY session logging: if it's safe, we skip the 'do you
want to overwrite or append?' dialog box.
On earlier Windows you can use FindFirstFile to get a similar effect,
so that's what we fall back to. It's not quite the same, though - if
you pass a wildcard then it will succeed when you'd rather it had
failed. But it's good enough to at least work in normal cases.
This way, anyone who needs to use the version data can quickly call
init_winver to make sure it's been set up, and not waste too much faff
redoing the actual work.
These two tools had ad-hoc command loops with similar options, and I
want to extend both (in particular, in a way that introduces options
with arguments). So I've started by throwing together some common code
to do all the tedious bits like finding option arguments wherever they
might be, throwing errors, handling "--" and so on.
Should be no functional change to the existing command-line syntax,
except that now all long options are recognised in both "-foo" and
"--foo" form.
In the previous state of the code, we first tested agent_exists() to
decide whether to be the long-running Pageant server or a short-lived
client; then, during the command-line parsing loop, we prompted for
passphrases to add keys presented on the command line (to ourself or
the server, respectively); *then* we set up the named pipe and
WM_COPYDATA receiver window to actually start functioning as a server,
if we decided that was our role.
A consequence is that if a user started up two Pageants each with an
encrypted key on the command line, there would be a race condition:
each one would decide that it was _going_ to be the server, then
prompt for a passphrase, and then try to set itself up as the server
once the passphrase is entered. So whichever one's passphrase prompt
was answered second would add its key to its own internal data
structures, then fail to set up the server's named pipe, terminate
with an error, and end up not having added its key to the _surviving_
server.
This change reorders the setup steps so that the command-line parsing
loop does not add the keys immediately; instead it merely caches the
key filenames provided. Then we make the decision about whether we're
the server, and set up both the named pipe and WM_COPYDATA window if
we are; and finally, we go back to our list of key filenames and
actually add them, either to ourself (if we're the server) or to some
other Pageant (if we're a client).
Moreover, the decision about whether to be the server is now wrapped
in an interprocess mutex similar to the one used in connection
sharing, which means that even if two or more Pageants are started up
as close to simultaneously as possible, they should avoid a race
condition and successfully manage to agree on exactly one of
themselves to be the server. For example, a user reported that this
could occur if you put shortcuts to multiple private key files in your
Windows Startup folder, so that they were all launched simultaneously
at startup.
One slightly odd behaviour that remains: if the server Pageant has to
prompt for private key passphrases at startup, then it won't actually
start _servicing_ requests from other Pageants until it's finished
dealing with its own prompts. As a result, if you do start up two
Pageants at once each with an encrypted key file on its command line,
the second one won't even manage to present its passphrase prompt
until the first one's prompt is dismissed, because it will block
waiting for the initial check of the key list. But it will get there
in the end, so that's only a cosmetic oddity.
It would be nice to arrange that Pageant GUI operations don't block
unrelated agent requests (e.g. by having the GUI and the agent code
run in separate threads). But that's a bigger problem, not specific to
startup time - the same thing happens if you interactively load a key
via Pageant's file dialog. And it would require a major reorganisation
to fix that fully, because currently the GUI code depends on being
able to call _internal_ Pageant query functions like
pageant_count_ssh2_keys() that don't work by constructing an agent
request at all.
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!)
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.
Trying to debug a problem involving threads just now, it turned out
that the version of the diagnostics going to my debug.log was getting
data in a different order from the version going to the debug console.
Now I open and write to debug_fp by going directly to the Win32 API
instead of via a buffering userland stdio, and that seems to have
solved the problem.
I just happened to notice that just below my huge comment explaining
the two command-line splitting policies, there's a smaller one that
refers to it as '(see large comment below)'. It's not below - it's
above!
That was because the older parts of that comment had previously been
inside split_into_argv(), until I moved the explanation further up the
file to the top level. Another consequence of that was that the older
section of the comment was wrapped to a strangely narrow line width,
because it had previously been indented further right.
Folded the two comments together, and rewrapped the narrow paragraphs.
The code to find out the location of the c:\windows\system32 directory
was already present, in load_system32_dll(). Now it's moved out into a
function of its own, so it can be called in other contexts.
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.
This applies to all of AES, SHA-1, SHA-256 and SHA-512. All those
source files previously contained multiple implementations of the
algorithm, enabled or disabled by ifdefs detecting whether they would
work on a given compiler. And in order to get advanced machine
instructions like AES-NI or NEON crypto into the output file when the
compile flags hadn't enabled them, we had to do nasty stuff with
compiler-specific pragmas or attributes.
Now we can do the detection at cmake time, and enable advanced
instructions in the more sensible way, by compile-time flags. So I've
broken up each of these modules into lots of sub-pieces: a file called
(e.g.) 'foo-common.c' containing common definitions across all
implementations (such as round constants), one called 'foo-select.c'
containing the top-level vtable(s), and a separate file for each
implementation exporting just the vtable(s) for that implementation.
One advantage of this is that it depends a lot less on compiler-
specific bodgery. My particular least favourite part of the previous
setup was the part where I had to _manually_ define some Arm ACLE
feature macros before including <arm_neon.h>, so that it would define
the intrinsics I wanted. Now I'm enabling interesting architecture
features in the normal way, on the compiler command line, there's no
need for that kind of trick: the right feature macros are already
defined and <arm_neon.h> does the right thing.
Another change in this reorganisation is that I've stopped assuming
there's just one hardware implementation per platform. Previously, the
accelerated vtables were called things like sha256_hw, and varied
between FOO-NI and NEON depending on platform; and the selection code
would simply ask 'is hw available? if so, use hw, else sw'. Now, each
HW acceleration strategy names its vtable its own way, and the
selection vtable has a whole list of possibilities to iterate over
looking for a supported one. So if someone feels like writing a second
accelerated implementation of something for a given platform - for
example, I've heard you can use plain NEON to speed up AES somewhat
even without the crypto extension - then it will now have somewhere to
drop in alongside the existing ones.
I've finally got round to updating this system for the fixed
(post-VS7) command-line splitting. That means I need to regenerate the
table in the big comment. So here's an automated method of doing it
that doesn't require me to read off the output of -generate in an
error-prone manual way.
Something weird was happening in the string handling which caused the
output to be full of the kind of gibberish you expect to see from
unterminated strings. Rather than debug it in detail, I've taken
advantage of now having the utils library conveniently available, and
simply used a strbuf, which I _know_ works sensibly.
I found these while going through the code, and decided if we're going
to have them then we should compile them. They didn't all compile
first time, proving my point :-)
I've enhanced the tree234 test so that it has a verbose option, which
by default is off.
Now that the new CMake build system is encouraging us to lay out the
code like a set of libraries, it seems like a good idea to make them
look more _like_ libraries, by putting things into separate modules as
far as possible.
This fixes several previous annoyances in which you had to link
against some object in order to get a function you needed, but that
object also contained other functions you didn't need which included
link-time symbol references you didn't want to have to deal with. The
usual offender was subsidiary supporting programs including misc.c for
some innocuous function and then finding they had to deal with the
requirements of buildinfo().
This big reorganisation introduces three new subdirectories called
'utils', one at the top level and one in each platform subdir. In each
case, the directory contains basically the same files that were
previously placed in the 'utils' build-time library, except that the
ones that were extremely miscellaneous (misc.c, utils.c, uxmisc.c,
winmisc.c, winmiscs.c, winutils.c) have been split up into much
smaller pieces.