Now the three 'proper' BPPs each have a BPP_READ() macro that wraps up
the fiddly combination of crMaybeWaitUntilV and bufchainery they use
to read a fixed-length amount of input data. The sshverstring 'BPP'
doesn't read fixed-length data in quite the same way, but it has a
similar BPP_WAITFOR macro.
No functional change. Mostly this is just a cleanup to make the code
more legible, but also, the new macros will be a good place to
centralise anything else that needs doing on every read, such as EOF
checking.
This is a new idea I've had to make memory-management of PktIn even
easier. The idea is that a PktIn is essentially _always_ an element of
some linked-list queue: if it's not one of the queues by which packets
move through ssh.c, then it's a special 'free queue' which holds
packets that are unowned and due to be freed.
pq_pop() on a PktInQueue automatically relinks the packet to the free
queue, and also triggers an idempotent callback which will empty the
queue and really free all the packets on it. Hence, you can pop a
packet off a real queue, parse it, handle it, and then just assume
it'll get tidied up at some point - the only constraint being that you
have to finish with it before returning to the application's main loop.
The exception is that it's OK to pq_push() the packet back on to some
other PktInQueue, because a side effect of that will be to _remove_ it
from the free queue again. (And if _all_ the incoming packets get that
treatment, then when the free-queue handler eventually runs, it may
find it has nothing to do - which is harmless.)
Vtable objects only need to be globally visible throughout the code if
they're used directly in some interchangeable way, e.g. by passing
them to a constructor like cipher_new that's the same for all
implementations of the vtable, or by directly looking up public data
fields in the vtable itself.
But the BPPs are never used like that: each BPP has its own
constructor function with a different type signature, so the BPP types
are not interchangeable in any way _before_ an instance of one has
been constructed. Hence, their vtable objects don't need external
linkage.
I've just noticed that we call ssh1_bpp_start_compression even if the
server responded to our compression request with SSH1_SMSG_FAILURE!
Also, while I'm here, there's a potential race condition if the server
were to send an unrelated message (such as SSH1_MSG_IGNORE)
immediately after the SSH1_SMSG_SUCCESS that indicates compression
being enabled - the BPP would try to decode the compressed IGNORE
message before the SUCCESS got to the higher layer that would tell the
BPP it should have enabled compression. Fixed that by changing the
method by which we tell the BPP what's going on.
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.