I remembered the existence of that module while I was changing the API
of the CRC functions. It's still quite possibly the only code in PuTTY
not written specifically _for_ PuTTY, so it definitely deserves a bit
of a test suite.
In order to expose it through the ptrlen-centric testcrypt system,
I've added some missing 'const' in the detector module itself, but
otherwise I've left the detector code as it was.
Finding even semi-official test vectors for this CRC implementation
was hard, because it turns out not to _quite_ match any of the well
known ones catalogued on the web. Its _polynomial_ is well known, but
the combination of details that go alongside it (starting state,
post-hashing transformation) are not quite the same as any other hash
I know of.
After trawling catalogue websites for a while I finally worked out
that SSH-1's CRC and RFC 1662's CRC are basically the same except for
different choices of starting value and final adjustment. And RFC
1662's CRC is common enough that there _are_ test vectors.
So I've renamed the previous crc32_compute function to crc32_ssh1,
reflecting that it seems to be its own thing unlike any other CRC;
implemented the RFC 1662 CRC as well, as an alternative tiny wrapper
on the inner crc32_update function; and exposed all three functions to
testcrypt. That lets me run standard test vectors _and_ directed tests
of the internal update routine, plus one check that crc32_ssh1 itself
does what I expect.
While I'm here, I've also modernised the code to use uint32_t in place
of unsigned long, and ptrlen instead of separate pointer,length
arguments. And I've removed the general primer on CRC theory from the
header comment, in favour of the more specifically useful information
about _which_ CRC this is and how it matches up to anything else out
there.
(I've bowed to inevitability and put the directed CRC tests in the
'crypt' class in cryptsuite.py. Of course this is a misnomer, since
CRC isn't cryptography, but it falls into the same category in terms
of the role it plays in SSH-1, and I didn't feel like making a new
pointedly-named 'notreallycrypt' container class just for this :-)
My normal habit these days, in new code, is to treat int and bool as
_almost_ completely separate types. I'm still willing to use C's
implicit test for zero on an integer (e.g. 'if (!blob.len)' is fine,
no need to spell it out as blob.len != 0), but generally, if a
variable is going to be conceptually a boolean, I like to declare it
bool and assign to it using 'true' or 'false' rather than 0 or 1.
PuTTY is an exception, because it predates the C99 bool, and I've
stuck to its existing coding style even when adding new code to it.
But it's been annoying me more and more, so now that I've decided C99
bool is an acceptable thing to require from our toolchain in the first
place, here's a quite thorough trawl through the source doing
'boolification'. Many variables and function parameters are now typed
as bool rather than int; many assignments of 0 or 1 to those variables
are now spelled 'true' or 'false'.
I managed this thorough conversion with the help of a custom clang
plugin that I wrote to trawl the AST and apply heuristics to point out
where things might want changing. So I've even managed to do a decent
job on parts of the code I haven't looked at in years!
To make the plugin's work easier, I pushed platform front ends
generally in the direction of using standard 'bool' in preference to
platform-specific boolean types like Windows BOOL or GTK's gboolean;
I've left the platform booleans in places they _have_ to be for the
platform APIs to work right, but variables only used by my own code
have been converted wherever I found them.
In a few places there are int values that look very like booleans in
_most_ of the places they're used, but have a rarely-used third value,
or a distinction between different nonzero values that most users
don't care about. In these cases, I've _removed_ uses of 'true' and
'false' for the return values, to emphasise that there's something
more subtle going on than a simple boolean answer:
- the 'multisel' field in dialog.h's list box structure, for which
the GTK front end in particular recognises a difference between 1
and 2 but nearly everything else treats as boolean
- the 'urgent' parameter to plug_receive, where 1 vs 2 tells you
something about the specific location of the urgent pointer, but
most clients only care about 0 vs 'something nonzero'
- the return value of wc_match, where -1 indicates a syntax error in
the wildcard.
- the return values from SSH-1 RSA-key loading functions, which use
-1 for 'wrong passphrase' and 0 for all other failures (so any
caller which already knows it's not loading an _encrypted private_
key can treat them as boolean)
- term->esc_query, and the 'query' parameter in toggle_mode in
terminal.c, which _usually_ hold 0 for ESC[123h or 1 for ESC[?123h,
but can also hold -1 for some other intervening character that we
don't support.
In a few places there's an integer that I haven't turned into a bool
even though it really _can_ only take values 0 or 1 (and, as above,
tried to make the call sites consistent in not calling those values
true and false), on the grounds that I thought it would make it more
confusing to imply that the 0 value was in some sense 'negative' or
bad and the 1 positive or good:
- the return value of plug_accepting uses the POSIXish convention of
0=success and nonzero=error; I think if I made it bool then I'd
also want to reverse its sense, and that's a job for a separate
piece of work.
- the 'screen' parameter to lineptr() in terminal.c, where 0 and 1
represent the default and alternate screens. There's no obvious
reason why one of those should be considered 'true' or 'positive'
or 'success' - they're just indices - so I've left it as int.
ssh_scp_recv had particularly confusing semantics for its previous int
return value: its call sites used '<= 0' to check for error, but it
never actually returned a negative number, just 0 or 1. Now the
function and its call sites agree that it's a bool.
In a couple of places I've renamed variables called 'ret', because I
don't like that name any more - it's unclear whether it means the
return value (in preparation) for the _containing_ function or the
return value received from a subroutine call, and occasionally I've
accidentally used the same variable for both and introduced a bug. So
where one of those got in my way, I've renamed it to 'toret' or 'retd'
(the latter short for 'returned') in line with my usual modern
practice, but I haven't done a thorough job of finding all of them.
Finally, one amusing side effect of doing this is that I've had to
separate quite a few chained assignments. It used to be perfectly fine
to write 'a = b = c = TRUE' when a,b,c were int and TRUE was just a
the 'true' defined by stdbool.h, that idiom provokes a warning from
gcc: 'suggest parentheses around assignment used as truth value'!
The annoying int64.h is completely retired, since C99 guarantees a
64-bit integer type that you can actually treat like an ordinary
integer. Also, I've replaced the local typedefs uint32 and word32
(scattered through different parts of the crypto code) with the
standard uint32_t.
malloc functions, which automatically cast to the same type they're
allocating the size of. Should prevent any future errors involving
mallocing the size of the wrong structure type, and will also make
life easier if we ever need to turn the PuTTY core code from real C
into C++-friendly C. I haven't touched the Mac frontend in this
checkin because I couldn't compile or test it.
[originally from svn r3014]
Simon Tatham
Jacob Nevins