(TL;DR: to suppress redundant 'Press Return to begin session' prompts
in between hops of a jump-host configuration, in Plink.)
This new query method directly asks the Seat the question: is the same
stream of input used to provide responses to interactive login
prompts, and the session input provided after login concludes?
It's used to suppress the last-ditch anti-spoofing defence in Plink of
interactively asking 'Access granted. Press Return to begin session',
on the basis that any such spoofing attack works by confusing the user
about what's a legit login prompt before the session begins and what's
sent by the server after the main session begins - so if those two
things take input from different places, the user can't be confused.
This doesn't change the existing behaviour of Plink, which was already
suppressing the antispoof prompt in cases where its standard input was
redirected from something other than a terminal. But previously it was
doing it within the can_set_trust_status() seat query, and I've now
moved it out into a separate query function.
The reason why these need to be separate is for SshProxy, which needs
to give an unusual combination of answers when run inside Plink. For
can_set_trust_status(), it needs to return whatever the parent Seat
returns, so that all the login prompts for a string of proxy
connections in session will be antispoofed the same way. But you only
want that final 'Access granted' prompt to happen _once_, after all
the proxy connection setup phases are done, because up until then
you're still in the safe hands of PuTTY itself presenting an unbroken
sequence of legit login prompts (even if they come from a succession
of different servers). Hence, SshProxy unconditionally returns 'no' to
the query of whether it has a single mixed input stream, because
indeed, it never does - for purposes of session input it behaves like
an always-redirected Plink, no matter what kind of real Seat it ends
up sending its pre-session login prompts to.
I'd forgotten that the text-only branch of seat_antispoof_msg()
constructs a string from its input in the expectation that it's a
one-line message. So it was a mistake to put a \n at the start of the
string in interactor_announce() to get a blank line first.
Now interactor_announce() makes an extra call to seat_antispoof_msg to
show its blank line, and seat_antispoof_msg itself handles the
blank-line case specially.
This is generated when setup of a network connection is cancelled by
deliberate user action, namely, pressing ^C or ^D or the like at a
get_userpass_input prompt presented during proxy setup.
It's handled just like normal socket setup errors, except that it
omits the call to seat_connection_fatal, on the grounds that in this
one case of connection-setup failure, the user doesn't need to be
_informed_ that the connection failed - they already know, because
they failed it themself on purpose.
Passing an operating-system-specific error code to plug_closing(),
such as errno or GetLastError(), was always a bit weird, given that it
generally had to be handled by cross-platform receiving code in
backends. I had the platform.h implementations #define any error
values that the cross-platform code would have to handle specially,
but that's still not a great system, because it also doesn't leave
freedom to invent error representations of my own that don't
correspond to any OS code. (For example, the ones I just removed from
proxy.h.)
So now, the OS error code is gone from the plug_closing API, and in
its place is a custom enumeration of closure types: normal, error, and
the special case BROKEN_PIPE which is the only OS error code we have
so far needed to handle specially. (All others just mean 'abandon the
connection and print the textual message'.)
Having already centralised the handling of OS error codes in the
previous commit, we've now got a convenient place to add any further
type codes for errors needing special handling: each of Unix
plug_closing_errno(), Windows plug_closing_system_error(), and Windows
plug_closing_winsock_error() can easily grow extra special cases if
need be, and each one will only have to live in one place.
Having a single plug_closing() function covering various kinds of
closure is reasonably convenient from the point of view of Plug
implementations, but it's annoying for callers, who all have to fill
in pointless NULL and 0 parameters in the cases where they're not
used.
Added some inline helper functions in network.h alongside the main
plug_closing() dispatch wrappers, so that each kind of connection
closure can present a separate API for the Socket side of the
interface, without complicating the vtable for the Plug side.
Also, added OS-specific extra helpers in the Unix and Windows
directories, which centralise the job of taking an OS error code (of
whatever kind) and translating it into its error message.
In passing, this removes the horrible ad-hoc made-up error codes in
proxy.h, which is OK, because nothing checked for them anyway, and
also I'm about to do an API change to plug_closing proper that removes
the need for them.
Now we always respond to backend disconnection or connection_fatal by
calling plug_closing. And we always do it in a toplevel callback, so
that when the Plug responds by calling our Socket close method (which
frees us), nothing re-entrant happens.
Also, the handling of notify_remote_disconnect is brought into line
with the spec in putty.h, which says it can be sent redundantly (when
already disconnected) or spuriously (when not even disconnected at
all), so the toplevel callback queued by that method will check first.
After this change, failures during connection_setup are now handled
_mostly_ sensibly: if the proxy connection fails, then the main
connection gets enough information to pass a sensible connection_fatal
on to the real front end.
This also fixes the assertion failure mentioned in the TODO comment,
replacing it with a reasonably sensible connection_fatal() - although
I still think that in that situation it might be better not to have a
dialog box at all.
In interactor_return_seat, I wrote a comment saying that we should
call interactor_announce when handing over to the next Interactor in
the chain, *if* any Interactor had already made any kind of
announcement.
But, having written that comment, I didn't actually *implement* the
'if' clause, and called interactor_announce unconditionally! Now
fixed.
Removed the FIXMEs in various Seat passthrough functions that were
there to remind me to say which SSH connection they referred to: that
is now done by the interactor_announce mechanism, as of commit
215b9d1775. (Though not by modifying the actual passthrough
functions, as it turned out, which is how I didn't find and remove the
FIXMEs when I did all that.)
Also, added a comment in wrap() explaining *why* it's allowed to (in
fact, must) cheat by making an InteractionReadySeat without going
through interactor_announce().
Finally, the payoff from all of this refactoring: now, when a proxy
prompts interactively during connection setup, you get a message in
advance telling you which Interactor is originating the following
messages.
To achieve this, I've arranged to link Interactors together into a
list, so that any Interactor created by a proxy has a 'parent' pointer
pointing to the Interactor its client passed to new_connection().
This allows interactor_announce() to follow the links back up the
chain and count them, so that it knows whether it's a primary
connection, or a proxy, or a proxy-for-a-proxy, or more generally an
nth-order proxy, and can include that in its announcement.
And secondly, once interactor_announce() reaches the top of the chain,
it can use that as a storage location agreed on by all Interactors in
the whole setup, to tell each other which one of them was the last to
do anything interactive. Then, whenever there's a change of
Interactor, a message can be printed to indicate it to the user; and
when the same Interactor does multiple things in succession, you don't
get a slew of pointless messages in between them all.
Previously, SshProxy dealt with creating a TempSeat to wrap the one it
was borrowing from its client, and then each client in turn dealt with
detecting when it had had its seat borrowed and finishing up with the
TempSeat. The latter involved a lot of code duplication; the former
didn't involve code duplication _yet_ (since SshProxy was the only
thing doing this job), but would have once we started wanting to do
interactive password prompting for other types of network proxy.
Now all of that functionality is centralised into two new Interactor
helper functions: interactor_borrow_seat and interactor_return_seat.
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.
Thanks to the previous commit, this new parameter can replace two of
the existing ones: instead of passing a LogPolicy and a Seat, we now
pass just an Interactor, from which any proxy implementation can
extract the LogPolicy and the Seat anyway if they need it.
Previously, SSH authentication banners were displayed by calling the
ordinary seat_output function, and passing it a special value in the
SeatOutputType enumeration indicating an auth banner.
The awkwardness of this was already showing a little in SshProxy's
implementation of seat_output, where it had to check for that special
value and do totally different things for SEAT_OUTPUT_AUTH_BANNER and
everything else. Further work in that area is going to make it more
and more awkward if I keep the two output systems unified.
So let's split them up. Now, Seat has separate output() and banner()
methods, which each implementation can override differently if it
wants to.
All the 'end user' Seat implementations use the centralised
implementation function nullseat_banner_to_stderr(), which turns
banner text straight back into SEAT_OUTPUT_STDERR and passes it on to
seat_output. So I didn't have to tediously implement a boring version
of this function in GTK, Windows GUI, consoles, file transfer etc.
There are quite a few of them already, and I'm about to make another
one, so let's start with a bit of tidying up.
The CMake build organisation is unchanged: I haven't put the proxy
object files into a separate library, just moved the locations of the
source files. (Organising proxying as a library would be tricky
anyway, because of the various overrides for tools that want to avoid
cryptography.)
