This consists of DJB's 'Streamlined NTRU Prime' quantum-resistant
cryptosystem, currently in round 3 of the NIST post-quantum key
exchange competition; it's run in parallel with ordinary Curve25519,
and generates a shared secret combining the output of both systems.
(Hence, even if you don't trust this newfangled NTRU Prime thing at
all, it's at least no _less_ secure than the kex you were using
already.)
As the OpenSSH developers point out, key exchange is the most urgent
thing to make quantum-resistant, even before working quantum computers
big enough to break crypto become available, because a break of the
kex algorithm can be applied retroactively to recordings of your past
sessions. By contrast, authentication is a real-time protocol, and can
only be broken by a quantum computer if there's one available to
attack you _already_.
I've implemented both sides of the mechanism, so that PuTTY and Uppity
both support it. In my initial testing, the two sides can both
interoperate with the appropriate half of OpenSSH, and also (of
course, but it would be embarrassing to mess it up) with each other.
This is already slightly nice because it lets me separate the
Weierstrass and Montgomery code more completely, without having to
have a vtable tucked into dh->extra. But more to the point, it will
allow completely different kex methods to fit into the same framework
later.
To that end, I've moved more of the descriptive message generation
into the vtable, and also provided the constructor with a flag that
will let it do different things in client and server.
Also, following on from a previous commit, I've arranged that the new
API returns arbitrary binary data for the exchange hash, rather than
an mp_int. An upcoming implementation of this interface will want to
return an encoded string instead of an encoded mp_int.
Until now, every kex method has represented the output as an mp_int.
So we were storing it in the mp_int field s->K, and adding it to the
exchange hash and key derivation hashes via put_mp_ssh2.
But there's now going to be the first kex method that represents the
output as a string (so that it might have the top bit set, or multiple
leading zero bytes, without its length varying). So we now need to be
more general.
The most general thing it's sensible to do is to replace s->K with a
strbuf containing _already-encoded_ data to become part of the hash,
including length fields if necessary. So every existing kex method
still derives an mp_int, but then immediately puts it into that strbuf
using put_mp_ssh2 and frees it.
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!)
In SSH-1 there's a function that takes a void * that it casts to the
state of the login layer. The corresponding function in SSH-2 casts it
to the state of a differently named layer, but I had still called the
parameter 'loginv'.
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.
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.
This is used to notify the Seat that some data has been cleared from
the backend's outgoing data buffer. In other words, it notifies the
Seat that it might be worth calling backend_sendbuffer() again.
We've never needed this before, because until now, Seats have always
been the 'main program' part of the application, meaning they were
also in control of the event loop. So they've been able to call
backend_sendbuffer() proactively, every time they go round the event
loop, instead of having to wait for a callback.
But now, the SSH proxy is the first example of a Seat without
privileged access to the event loop, so it has no way to find out that
the backend's sendbuffer has got smaller. And without that, it can't
pass that notification on to plug_sent, to unblock in turn whatever
the proxied connection might have been waiting to send.
In fact, before this commit, sshproxy.c never called plug_sent at all.
As a result, large data uploads over an SSH jump host would hang
forever as soon as the outgoing buffer filled up for the first time:
the main backend (to which sshproxy.c was acting as a Socket) would
carefully stop filling up the buffer, and then never receive the call
to plug_sent that would cause it to start again.
The new callback is ignored everywhere except in sshproxy.c. It might
be a good idea to remove backend_sendbuffer() entirely and convert all
previous uses of it into non-empty implementations of this callback,
so that we've only got one system; but for the moment, I haven't done
that.
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.
