LogContext is now the owner of the logevent() function that back ends
and so forth are constantly calling. Previously, logevent was owned by
the Frontend, which would store the message into its list for the GUI
Event Log dialog (or print it to standard error, or whatever) and then
pass it _back_ to LogContext to write to the currently open log file.
Now it's the other way round: LogContext gets the message from the
back end first, writes it to its log file if it feels so inclined, and
communicates it back to the front end.
This means that lots of parts of the back end system no longer need to
have a pointer to a full-on Frontend; the only thing they needed it
for was logging, so now they just have a LogContext (which many of
them had to have anyway, e.g. for logging SSH packets or session
traffic).
LogContext itself also doesn't get a full Frontend pointer any more:
it now talks back to the front end via a little vtable of its own
called LogPolicy, which contains the method that passes Event Log
entries through, the old askappend() function that decides whether to
truncate a pre-existing log file, and an emergency function for
printing an especially prominent message if the log file can't be
created. One minor nice effect of this is that console and GUI apps
can implement that last function subtly differently, so that Unix
console apps can write it with a plain \n instead of the \r\n
(harmless but inelegant) that the old centralised implementation
generated.
One other consequence of this is that the LogContext has to be
provided to backend_init() so that it's available to backends from the
instant of creation, rather than being provided via a separate API
call a couple of function calls later, because backends have typically
started doing things that need logging (like making network
connections) before the call to backend_provide_logctx. Fortunately,
there's no case in the whole code base where we don't already have
logctx by the time we make a backend (so I don't actually remember why
I ever delayed providing one). So that shortens the backend API by one
function, which is always nice.
While I'm tidying up, I've also moved the printf-style logeventf() and
the handy logevent_and_free() into logging.c, instead of having copies
of them scattered around other places. This has also let me remove
some stub functions from a couple of outlying applications like
Pageant. Finally, I've removed the pointless "_tag" at the end of
LogContext's official struct name.
The sshverstring quasi-frontend is passed a Frontend pointer at setup
time, so that it can generate Event Log entries containing the local
and remote version strings and the results of remote bug detection.
I'm promoting that field of sshverstring to a field of the public BPP
structure, so now all BPPs have the right to talk directly to the
frontend if they want to. This means I can move all the log messages
of the form 'Initialised so-and-so cipher/MAC/compression' down into
the BPPs themselves, where they can live exactly alongside the actual
initialisation of those primitives.
It also means BPPs will be able to log interesting things they detect
at any point in the packet stream, which is about to come in useful
for another purpose.
Ian Jackson points out that the Linux kernel has a macro of this name
with the same purpose, and suggests that it's a good idea to use the
same name as they do, so that at least some people reading one code
base might recognise it from the other.
I never really thought very hard about what order FROMFIELD's
parameters should go in, and therefore I'm pleasantly surprised to
find that my order agrees with the kernel's, so I don't have to
permute every call site as part of making this change :-)
When any BPP calls ssh_remote_error or ssh_remote_eof, it triggers an
immediate cleanup of the BPP itself - so on return from one of those
functions we should avoid going straight to the crFinish macro,
because that will write to s->crState, which no longer exists.
I've tried to separate out as many individually coherent changes from
this work as I could into their own commits, but here's where I run
out and have to commit the rest of this major refactoring as a
big-bang change.
Most of ssh.c is now no longer in ssh.c: all five of the main
coroutines that handle layers of the SSH-1 and SSH-2 protocols now
each have their own source file to live in, and a lot of the
supporting functions have moved into the appropriate one of those too.
The new abstraction is a vtable called 'PacketProtocolLayer', which
has an input and output packet queue. Each layer's main coroutine is
invoked from the method ssh_ppl_process_queue(), which is usually
(though not exclusively) triggered automatically when things are
pushed on the input queue. In SSH-2, the base layer is the transport
protocol, and it contains a pair of subsidiary queues by which it
passes some of its packets to the higher SSH-2 layers - first userauth
and then connection, which are peers at the same level, with the
former abdicating in favour of the latter at the appropriate moment.
SSH-1 is simpler: the whole login phase of the protocol (crypto setup
and authentication) is all in one module, and since SSH-1 has no
repeat key exchange, that setup layer abdicates in favour of the
connection phase when it's done.
ssh.c itself is now about a tenth of its old size (which all by itself
is cause for celebration!). Its main job is to set up all the layers,
hook them up to each other and to the BPP, and to funnel data back and
forth between that collection of modules and external things such as
the network and the terminal. Once it's set up a collection of packet
protocol layers, it communicates with them partly by calling methods
of the base layer (and if that's ssh2transport then it will delegate
some functionality to the corresponding methods of its higher layer),
and partly by talking directly to the connection layer no matter where
it is in the stack by means of the separate ConnectionLayer vtable
which I introduced in commit 8001dd4cb, and to which I've now added
quite a few extra methods replacing services that used to be internal
function calls within ssh.c.
(One effect of this is that the SSH-1 and SSH-2 channel storage is now
no longer shared - there are distinct struct types ssh1_channel and
ssh2_channel. That means a bit more code duplication, but on the plus
side, a lot fewer confusing conditionals in the middle of half-shared
functions, and less risk of a piece of SSH-1 escaping into SSH-2 or
vice versa, which I remember has happened at least once in the past.)
The bulk of this commit introduces the five new source files, their
common header sshppl.h and some shared supporting routines in
sshcommon.c, and rewrites nearly all of ssh.c itself. But it also
includes a couple of other changes that I couldn't separate easily
enough:
Firstly, there's a new handling for socket EOF, in which ssh.c sets an
'input_eof' flag in the BPP, and that responds by checking a flag that
tells it whether to report the EOF as an error or not. (This is the
main reason for those new BPP_READ / BPP_WAITFOR macros - they can
check the EOF flag every time the coroutine is resumed.)
Secondly, the error reporting itself is changed around again. I'd
expected to put some data fields in the public PacketProtocolLayer
structure that it could set to report errors in the same way as the
BPPs have been doing, but in the end, I decided propagating all those
data fields around was a pain and that even the BPPs shouldn't have
been doing it that way. So I've reverted to a system where everything
calls back to functions in ssh.c itself to report any connection-
ending condition. But there's a new family of those functions,
categorising the possible such conditions by semantics, and each one
has a different set of detailed effects (e.g. how rudely to close the
network connection, what exit status should be passed back to the
whole application, whether to send a disconnect message and/or display
a GUI error box).
I don't expect this to be immediately perfect: of course, the code has
been through a big upheaval, new bugs are expected, and I haven't been
able to do a full job of testing (e.g. I haven't tested every auth or
kex method). But I've checked that it _basically_ works - both SSH
protocols, all the different kinds of forwarding channel, more than
one auth method, Windows and Linux, connection sharing - and I think
it's now at the point where the easiest way to find further bugs is to
let it out into the wild and see what users can spot.
This is a convenient place for it because it abstracts away the
difference in disconnect packet formats between SSH-1 and -2, so when
I start restructuring, I'll be able to call it even from places that
don't know which version of SSH they're running.
Now, instead of writing each packet straight on to the raw output
bufchain by calling the BPP's format_packet function, the higher
protocol layers will put the packets on to a queue, which will
automatically trigger a callback (using the new mechanism for
embedding a callback in any packet queue) to make the BPP format its
queue on to the raw-output bufchain. That in turn triggers a second
callback which moves the data to the socket.
This means in particular that the CBC ignore-message workaround can be
moved into the new BPP routine to process the output queue, which is a
good place for it because then it can easily arrange to only put an
ignore message at the start of any sequence of packets that are being
formatted as a single output blob.
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.)
Now I've got a list macro defining all the packet types we recognise,
I can use it to write a test for 'is this a recognised code?', and use
that in turn to centralise detection of completely unrecognised codes
into the binary packet protocol, where any such messages will be
handled entirely internally and never even be seen by the next level
up. This lets me remove another big pile of boilerplate in ssh.c.
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 removed the encrypted_len fields from PktIn and PktOut, which
were used to communicate from the BPP to ssh.c how much each packet
contributed to the amount of data encrypted with a given set of cipher
keys. It seems more sensible to have the BPP itself keep that counter
- especially since only one of the three BPPs even needs to count it
at all. So now there's a new DataTransferStats structure which the BPP
updates, and ssh.c only needs to check it for overflow and reset the
limits.
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.
Simon Tatham