This is called just before closing the connection, and gives every PPL
one last chance to output anything to the user that it might have
buffered.
No functional change: all implementations so far are trivial, except
that the transport layer passes the call on to its higher
layer (because otherwise nothing would do so).
In recent months I've had two requests from different people to build
support into PuTTY for automatically handling complicated third-party
auth protocols layered on top of keyboard-interactive - the kind of
thing where you're asked to enter some auth response, and you have to
refer to some external source like a web server to find out what the
right response _is_, which is a pain to do by hand, so you'd prefer it
to be automated in the SSH client.
That seems like a reasonable thing for an end user to want, but I
didn't think it was a good idea to build support for specific
protocols of that kind directly into PuTTY, where there would no doubt
be an ever-lengthening list, and maintenance needed on all of them.
So instead, in collaboration with one of my correspondents, I've
designed and implemented a protocol to be spoken between PuTTY and a
plugin running as a subprocess. The plugin can opt to handle the
keyboard-interactive authentication loop on behalf of the user, in
which case PuTTY passes on all the INFO_REQUEST packets to it, and
lets it make up responses. It can also ask questions of the user if
necessary.
The protocol spec is provided in a documentation appendix. The entire
configuration for the end user consists of providing a full command
line to use as the subprocess.
In the contrib directory I've provided an example plugin written in
Python. It gives a set of fixed responses suitable for getting through
Uppity's made-up k-i system, because that was a reasonable thing I
already had lying around to test against. But it also provides example
code that someone else could pick up and insert their own live
response-provider into the middle of, assuming they were happy with it
being in Python.
I'm going to want to use it in an upcoming commit, because together
with 'savedhost', it forms the identification of an SSH server (at
least as far as the host key cache is concerned, and therefore it's
appropriate for other uses too).
We were already passing the hostname through for use in user-facing
prompts (not to mention the FQDN version for use in GSSAPI).
This is triggered by a new config option, or alternatively a -cert
command-line option. You provide a certificate file (i.e. a public key
containing one of the cert key formats), and then, whenever you
authenticate with a private key that matches the public key inside
that certificate, the certificate will be sent to the server in place
of whatever public key it would have used before.
I expect this to be more convenient for some users than the approach
of baking the certificate into a modified version of the PPK file -
especially users who want to use different certificates on the same
key, either in sequence (if a CA continually reissues certificates
with short lifetimes) or in parallel (if different hosts trust
different CAs).
In particular, this substitution is applied consistently, even when
doing authentication via an agent. So if your bare private key is held
in Pageant, you can _still_ specify a detached certificate, and PuTTY
will spot that the key it's picked from Pageant matches that
certificate, and do the same substitution.
The detached certificate also overrides an existing certificate, if
there was one on the public key already.
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.
The system for handling seat_get_userpass_input has always been
structured differently between GUI PuTTY and CLI tools like Plink.
In the CLI tools, password input is read directly from the OS
terminal/console device by console_get_userpass_input; this means that
you need to ensure the same terminal input data _hasn't_ already been
consumed by the main event loop and sent on to the backend. This is
achieved by the backend_sendok() method, which tells the event loop
when the backend has finished issuing password prompts, and hence,
when it's safe to start passing standard input to backend_send().
But in the GUI tools, input generated by the terminal window has
always been sent straight to backend_send(), regardless of whether
backend_sendok() says it wants it. So the terminal-based
implementation of username and password prompts has to work by
consuming input data that had _already_ been passed to the backend -
hence, any backend that needs to do that must keep its input on a
bufchain, and pass that bufchain to seat_get_userpass_input.
It's awkward that these two totally different systems coexist in the
first place. And now that SSH proxying needs to present interactive
prompts of its own, it's clear which one should win: the CLI style is
the Right Thing. So this change reworks the GUI side of the mechanism
to be more similar: terminal data now goes into a queue in the Ldisc,
and is not sent on to the backend until the backend says it's ready
for it via backend_sendok(). So terminal-based userpass prompts can
now consume data directly from that queue during the connection setup
stage.
As a result, the 'bufchain *' parameter has vanished from all the
userpass_input functions (both the official implementations of the
Seat trait method, and term_get_userpass_input() to which some of
those implementations delegate). The only function that actually used
that bufchain, namely term_get_userpass_input(), now instead reads
from the ldisc's input queue via a couple of new Ldisc functions.
(Not _trivial_ functions, since input buffered by Ldisc can be a
mixture of raw bytes and session specials like SS_EOL! The input queue
inside Ldisc is a bufchain containing a fiddly binary encoding that
can represent an arbitrary interleaving of those things.)
This greatly simplifies the calls to seat_get_userpass_input in
backends, which now don't have to mess about with passing their own
user_input bufchain around, or toggling their want_user_input flag
back and forth to request data to put on to that bufchain.
But the flip side is that now there has to be some _other_ method for
notifying the terminal when there's more input to be consumed during
an interactive prompt, and for notifying the backend when prompt input
has finished so that it can proceed to the next stage of the protocol.
This is done by a pair of extra callbacks: when more data is put on to
Ldisc's input queue, it triggers a call to term_get_userpass_input,
and when term_get_userpass_input finishes, it calls a callback
function provided in the prompts_t.
Therefore, any use of a prompts_t which *might* be asynchronous must
fill in the latter callback when setting up the prompts_t. In SSH, the
callback is centralised into a common PPL helper function, which
reinvokes the same PPL's process_queue coroutine; in rlogin we have to
set it up ourselves.
I'm sorry for this large and sprawling patch: I tried fairly hard to
break it up into individually comprehensible sub-patches, but I just
couldn't tease out any part of it that would stand sensibly alone.
Suggested by Manfred Kaiser, who also wrote most of this patch
(although outlying parts, like documentation and SSH-1 support, are by
me).
This is a second line of defence against the kind of spoofing attacks
in which a malicious or compromised SSH server rushes the client
through the userauth phase of SSH without actually requiring any auth
inputs (passwords or signatures or whatever), and then at the start of
the connection phase it presents something like a spoof prompt,
intended to be taken for part of userauth by the user but in fact with
some more sinister purpose.
Our existing line of defence against this is the trust sigil system,
and as far as I know, that's still working. This option allows a bit of
extra defence in depth: if you don't expect your SSH server to
trivially accept authentication in the first place, then enabling this
option will cause PuTTY to disconnect if it unexpectedly does so,
without the user having to spot the presence or absence of a fiddly
little sigil anywhere.
Several types of authentication count as 'trivial'. The obvious one is
the SSH-2 "none" method, which clients always try first so that the
failure message will tell them what else they can try, and which a
server can instead accept in order to authenticate you unconditionally.
But there are two other ways to do it that we know of: one is to run
keyboard-interactive authentication and send an empty INFO_REQUEST
packet containing no actual prompts for the user, and another even
weirder one is to send USERAUTH_SUCCESS in response to the user's
preliminary *offer* of a public key (instead of sending the usual PK_OK
to request an actual signature from the key).
This new option detects all of those, by clearing the 'is_trivial_auth'
flag only when we send some kind of substantive authentication response
(be it a password, a k-i prompt response, a signature, or a GSSAPI
token). So even if there's a further path through the userauth maze we
haven't spotted, that somehow avoids sending anything substantive, this
strategy should still pick it up.
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.
