Category Archives: Open Source

Open Source, Free Software, and similar

Mozilla, Network, Open Source, Web

Post FOSDEM 2017

I attended FOSDEM again in 2017 and it was as intense, chaotic and wonderful as ever. I met old friends, got new friends and I got to test a whole range of Belgian beers. Oh, and there was also a set of great open source related talks to enjoy!

On Saturday at 2pm I delivered my talk on curl in the main track in the almost frighteningly large room Janson. I estimate that it was almost half full, which would mean upwards 700 people in the audience. The talk itself went well. I got audible responses from the audience several times and I kept well within my given time with time over for questions. The trickiest problem was the audio from the people who asked questions because it wasn’t at all very easy to hear, while the audio is great for the audience and in the video recording. Slightly annoying because as everyone else heard, it made me appear half deaf. Oh well. I got great questions both then and from people approaching me after the talk. The questions and the feedback I get from a talk is really one of the things that makes me appreciate talking the most.

The video of the talk is available, and the slides can also be viewed.

So after I had spent some time discussing curl things and handing out many stickers after my talk, I managed to land in the cafeteria for a while until it was time for me to once again go and perform.

We’re usually a team of friends that hang out during FOSDEM and we all went over to the Mozilla room to be there perhaps 20 minutes before my talk was scheduled and wow, there was a huge crowd outside of that room already waiting by the time we arrived. When the doors then finally opened (about 10 minutes before my talk started), I had to zigzag my way through to get in, and there was a large amount of people who didn’t get in. None of my friends from the cafeteria made it in!

The Mozilla devroom had 363 seats, not a single one was unoccupied and there was people standing along the sides and the back wall. So, an estimated nearly 400 persons in that room saw me speak about HTTP/2 deployments numbers right now, how HTTP/2 doesn’t really work well under 2% packet loss situations and then a bit about how QUIC can solve some of that and what QUIC is and when we might see the first experiments coming with IETF-QUIC – which really isn’t the same as Google-QUIC was.

To be honest, it is hard to deliver a talk in twenty minutes and I  was only 30 seconds over my time. I got questions and after the talk I spent a long time talking with people about HTTP, HTTP/2, QUIC, curl and the future of Internet protocols and transports. Very interesting.

The video of my talk can be seen, and the slides are online too.

I’m not sure if I was just unusually unlucky in my choices, or if there really was more people this year, but I experienced that “FULL” sign more than usual this year.

I fully intend to return again next year. Who knows, maybe I’ll figure out something to talk about then too. See you there?

cURL and libcurl, Firefox, Network, Web

One URL standard please

19 Comments

Following up on the problem with our current lack of a universal URL standard that I blogged about in May 2016: My URL isn’t your URL. I want a single, unified URL standard that we would all stand behind, support and adhere to.

What triggers me this time, is yet another issue. A friendly curl user sent me this URL:

http://user@example.com:80@daniel.haxx.se

… and pasting this URL into different tools and browsers show that there’s not a wide agreement on how this should work. Is the URL legal in the first place and if so, which host should a client contact?

  • curl treats the ‘@’-character as a separator between userinfo and host name so ‘example.com’ becomes the host name, the port number is 80 followed by rubbish that curl ignores. (wget2, the next-gen wget that’s in development works identically)
  • wget extracts the example.com host name but rejects the port number due to the rubbish after the zero.
  • Edge and Safari say the URL is invalid and don’t go anywhere
  • Firefox and Chrome allow ‘@’ as part of the userinfo, take the ’80’ as a password and the host name then becomes ‘daniel.haxx.se’

The only somewhat modern “spec” for URLs is the WHATWG URL specification. The other major, but now somewhat aged, URL spec is RFC 3986, made by the IETF and published in 2005.

In 2015, URL problem statement and directions was published as an Internet-draft by Masinter and Ruby and it brings up most of the current URL spec problems. Some of them are also discussed in Ruby’s WHATWG URL vs IETF URI post from 2014.

What I would like to see happen…

Which group? A group!

Friends I know in the WHATWG suggest that I should dig in there and help them improve their spec. That would be a good idea if fixing the WHATWG spec would be the ultimate goal. I don’t think it is enough.

The WHATWG is highly browser focused and my interactions with members of that group that I have had in the past, have shown that there is little sympathy there for non-browsers who want to deal with URLs and there is even less sympathy or interest for URL schemes that the popular browsers don’t even support or care about. URLs cover much more than HTTP(S).

I have the feeling that WHATWG people would not like this work to be done within the IETF and vice versa. Since I’d like buy-in from both camps, and any other camps that might have an interest in URLs, this would need to be handled somehow.

It would also be great to get other major URL “consumers” on board, like authors of popular URL parsing libraries, tools and components.

Such a URL group would of course have to agree on the goal and how to get there, but I’ll still provide some additional things I want to see.

Update: I want to emphasize that I do not consider the WHATWG’s job bad, wrong or lost. I think they’ve done a great job at unifying browsers’ treatment of URLs. I don’t mean to belittle that. I just know that this group is only a small subset of the people who probably should be involved in a unified URL standard.

A single fixed spec

I can’t see any compelling reasons why a URL specification couldn’t reach a stable state and get published as *the* URL standard. The “living standard” approach may be fine for certain things (and in particular browsers that update every six weeks), but URLs are supposed to be long-lived and inter-operate far into the future so they really really should not change. Therefore, I think the IETF documentation model could work well for this.

The WHATWG spec documents what browsers do, and browsers do what is documented. At least that’s the theory I’ve been told, and it causes a spinning and never-ending loop that goes against my wish.

Document the format

The WHATWG specification is written in a pseudo code style, describing how a parser would “walk” over the string with a state machine and all. I know some people like that, I find it utterly annoying and really hard to figure out what’s allowed or not. I much more prefer the regular RFC style of describing protocol syntax.

IDNA

Can we please just say that host names in URLs should be handled according to IDNA2008 (RFC 5895)? WHATWG URL doesn’t state any IDNA spec number at all.

Move out irrelevant sections

“Irrelevant” when it comes to documenting the URL format that is. The WHATWG details several things that are related to URL for browsers but are mostly irrelevant to other URL consumers or producers. Like section “5. application/x-www-form-urlencoded” and “6. API”.

They would be better placed in a “URL considerations for browsers” companion document.

Working doesn’t imply sensible

So browsers accept URLs written with thousands of forward slashes instead of two. That is not a good reason for the spec to say that a URL may legitimately contain a thousand slashes. I’m totally convinced there’s no critical content anywhere using such formatted URLs and no soul will be sad if we’d restricted the number to a single-digit. So we should. And yeah, then browsers should reject URLs using more.

The slashes are only an example. The browsers have used a “liberal in what you accept” policy for a lot of things since forever, but we must resist to use that as a basis when nailing down a standard.

The odds of this happening soon?

I know there are individuals interested in seeing the URL situation getting worked on. We’ve seen articles and internet-drafts posted on the issue several times the last few years. Any year now I think we will see some movement for real trying to fix this. I hope I will manage to participate and contribute a little from my end.

Network, Open Source, Security

Lesser HTTPS for non-browsers

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An HTTPS client needs to do a whole lot of checks to make sure that the remote host is fine to communicate with to maintain the proper high security levels.

In this blog post, I will explain why and how the entire HTTPS ecosystem relies on the browsers to be good and strict and thanks to that, the rest of the HTTPS clients can get away with being much more lenient. And in fact that is good, because the browsers don’t help the rest of the ecosystem very much to do good verification at that same level.

Let me me illustrate with some examples.

CA certs

The server’s certificate must have been signed by a trusted CA (Certificate Authority). A client then needs the certificates from all the CAs that are trusted. Who’s a trusted CA and how would a client get their certs to use for verification?

You can say that you trust the same set of CAs that your operating system vendor trusts (which I’ve always thought is a bit of a stretch but hey, I can very well understand the convenience in this). If you want to do this as an HTTPS client you need to use native APIs in Windows or macOS, or you need to figure out where the cert bundle is stored if you’re using Linux.

If you’re not using the native libraries on windows and macOS or if you can’t find the bundle in your Linux distribution, or you’re in one of a large amount of other setups where you can’t use someone else’s bundle, then you need to gather this list by yourself.

How on earth would you gather a list of hundreds of CA certs that are used for the popular web sites on the net of today? Stand on someone else’s shoulders and use what they’ve done? Yeps, and conveniently enough Mozilla has such a bundle that is licensed to allow others to use it…

Mozilla doesn’t offer the set of CA certs in a format that anyone else can use really, which is the primary reason why we offer Mozilla’s cert bundle converted to PEM format on the curl web site. The other parties that collect CA certs at scale (Microsoft for Windows, Apple for macOS, etc) do even less.

Before you ask, Google doesn’t maintain their own list for Chrome. They piggyback the CA store provided on the operating system it runs on. (Update: Google maintains its own list for Android/Chrome OS.)

Further constraints

But the browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari all add additional constraints beyond that CA cert store, on what server certificates they consider to be fine and okay. They blacklist specific fingerprints, they set a last allowed date for certain CA providers to offer certificates for servers and more.

These additional constraints, or additional rules if you want, are never exported nor exposed to the world in ways that are easy for anyone to mimic (in other ways than that everyone of course can implement the same code logic in their ends). They’re done in code and they’re really hard for anyone not a browser to implement and keep up with.

This makes every non-browser HTTPS client susceptible to okaying certificates that have already been deemed not OK by security experts at the browser vendors. And in comparison, not many HTTPS clients can compare or stack up the amount of client-side TLS and security expertise that the browser developers can.

HSTS preload

HTTP Strict Transfer Security is a way for sites to tell clients that they are to be accessed over HTTPS only for a specified time into the future, and plain HTTP should then not be used for the duration of this rule. This setup removes the Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) risk on subsequent accesses for sites that may still get linked to via HTTP:// URLs or by users entering the web site names directly into the address bars and so on.

The browsers have a “HSTS preload list” which is a list of sites that people have submitted and they are HSTS sites that basically never time out and always will be accessed over HTTPS only. Forever. No risk for MITM even in the first access to these sites.

There are no such HSTS preload lists being provided for non-browser HTTPS clients so there’s no easy way for non-browsers to avoid the first access MITM even for these class of forever-on-HTTPS sites.

Update: The Chromium HSTS preload list is available in a JSON format.

SHA-1

I’m sure you’ve heard about the deprecation of SHA-1 as a certificate hashing algorithm and how the browsers won’t accept server certificates using this starting at some cut off date.

I’m not aware of any non-browser HTTPS client that makes this check. For services, API providers and others don’t serve “normal browsers” they can all continue to play SHA-1 certificates well into 2017 without tears or pain. Another ecosystem detail we rely on the browsers to fix for us since most of these providers want to work with browsers as well…

This isn’t really something that is magic or would be terribly hard for non-browsers to do, its just that it will make some users suddenly get errors for their otherwise working setups and that takes a firm attitude from the software provider that is hard to maintain. And you’d have to introduce your own cut-off date that you’d have to fight with your users about! 😉

TLS is hard to get right

TLS and HTTPS are full of tricky areas and dusty corners that are hard to get right. The more we can share tricks and rules the better it is for everyone.

I think the browser vendors could do much better to help the rest of the ecosystem. By making their meta data available to us in sensible formats mostly. For the good of the Internet.

Disclaimer

Yes I work for Mozilla which makes Firefox. A vendor and a browser that I write about above. I’ve been communicating internally about some of these issues already, but I’m otherwise not involved in those parts of Firefox.

cURL and libcurl, Network, Open Source

My talks at FOSDEM 2017

I couldn’t even recall how many times I’ve done this already, but in 2017 I am once again showing up in the cold and grey city called Brussels and the lovely FOSDEM conference, to talk. (Yes, it is cold and grey every February, trust me.) So I had to go back and count, and it turns out 2017 will become my 8th straight visit to FOSDEM and I believe it is the 5th year I’ll present there.First, a reminder about what I talked about at FOSDEM 2016: An HTTP/2 update. There’s also a (rather low quality) video recording of the talk to see there.

I’m scheduled for two presentations in 2017, and this year I’m breaking new ground for myself as I’m doing one of them on the “main track” which is the (according to me) most prestigious track held in one of the biggest rooms – seating more than 1,400 persons.

You know what’s cool? Running on billions of devices

Room: Janson, time: Saturday 14:00

Thousands of contributors help building the curl software which runs on several billions of devices and are affecting every human in the connected world daily. How this came to happen, who contributes and how Daniel at the wheel keeps it all together. How a hacking ring is actually behind it all and who funds this entire operation.

So that was HTTP/2, what’s next?

Room: UD2.218A, time: Saturday 16:30

A shorter recap on what HTTP/2 brought that HTTP/1 couldn’t offer before we dig in and look at some numbers that show how HTTP/2 has improved (browser) networking and the web experience for people.

Still, there are scenarios where HTTP/1’s multiple connections win over HTTP/2 in performance tests. Why is that and what is being done about it? Wasn’t HTTP/2 supposed to be the silver bullet?

A closer look at QUIC, its promises to fix the areas where HTTP/2 didn’t deliver and a check on where it is today. Is QUIC perhaps actually HTTP/3 in everything but the name?

Depending on what exactly happens in this area over time until FOSDEM, I will spice it up with more details on how we work on these protocol things in Mozilla/Firefox.

This will become my 3rd year in a row that I talk in the Mozilla devroom to present the state of the HTTP protocol and web transport.

cURL and libcurl, Open Source, Security

6 hours of bliss

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I sent out the release announcement for curl 7.52.0 exactly 07:59 in the morning of December 21, 2016. A Wednesday. We typically  release curl on Wednesdays out of old habit. It is a good release day.

curl 7.52.0 was just as any other release. Perhaps with a slightly larger set of new features than what’s typical for us. We introduce TLS 1.3 support, we now provide HTTPS-proxy support and the command line tool has this option called –fail-early that I think users will start to appreciate once they start to discover it. We also  announced three fixed security vulnerabilities. And some other good things.

I pushed the code to git, signed and uploaded the tarballs, I updated the info on the web site and I sent off that release announcement email and I felt good. Release-time good. That short feeling of relief and starting over on a new slate that I often experience these release days. Release days make me happy.

Any bets?

It is not unusual for someone to find a bug really fast after a release has shipped. As I was feeling good, I had to joke in the #curl IRC channel (42 minutes after that email):

08:41 <bagder> any bets on when the first bug report on the new release shows up? =)

Hours passed and maybe, just maybe there was not going to be any quick bugs filed on this release?

But of course. I wouldn’t write this blog post if it all had been nice and dandy. At 14:03, I got the email. 6 hours and 4 minutes since I wrote the 7.52.0 announcement email.

The email was addressed to the curl project security email list and included a very short patch and explanation how the existing code is wrong and needs “this fix” to work correctly. And it was entirely correct!

Now I didn’t feel that sense of happiness anymore. For some reason it was now completely gone and instead I felt something that involved sensations like rage, embarrassment and general tiredness. How the [beep] could this slip through like this?

I’ve done releases in the past that were broken to various extents but this is a sort of a new record and an unprecedented event. Enough time had passed that I couldn’t just yank the package from the download page either. I had to take it through the correct procedures.

What happened?

As part of a general code cleanup during this last development round, I changed all the internals to use a proper internal API to get random data and if libcurl is built with a TLS library it uses its provided API to get secure and safe random data. As a move to improve our use of random internally. We use this internal API for getting the nonce in authentication mechanisms such as Digest and NTLM and also for generating the boundary string in HTTP multipart formposts and more. (It is not used for any TLS or SSH level protocol stuff though.)

I did the largest part of the random overhaul of this in commit f682156a4f, just a little over a month ago.

Of course I made sure that all test cases kept working and there were no valgrind reports or anything, the code didn’t cause any compiler warnings. It did not generate any reports in the many clang-analyzer or Coverity static code analyzer runs we’ve done since. We run clang-analyzer daily and Coverity perhaps weekly.

But there’s a valgrind report just here!

Kamil Dudka, who sent the 14:03 email, got a valgrind error and that’s what set him off – but how come he got that and I didn’t?

The explanation consists of the following two conditions that together worked to hide the problem for us quite successfully:

  1. I (and I suppose several of the other curl hackers) usually build curl and libcurl “debug enabled”. This allows me to run more tests, do more diagnostics and debug it easier when I run into problems. It also provides a system with “fake random” so that we can actually verify that functions that otherwise use real random values generate the correct output when given a known random value… and yeah, this debug system prevented valgrind from detecting any problem!
  2. In the curl test suite we once had a problem with valgrind generating reports on third party libraries etc which then ended up as false positives. We then introduced a “valgrind report parser” that would detect if the report concerns curl or something else. It turns out this parser doesn’t detect the errors if curl is compiled without the cc’s -g command line option. And of course… curl and libcurl both build without -g by default!

The patch?

The vulnerable function basically uses this simple prototype. It is meant to get an “int” worth of random value stored in the buffer ‘rnd’ points to. That’s 4 bytes.

randit(struct Curl_easy *data, unsigned int *rnd)

But due to circumstances I can’t explain on anything other than my sloppy programming, I managed to write the function store random value in the actual pointer instead of the buffer it points to. So when the function returns, there’s nothing stored in the buffer. No 4 bytes of random. Just the uninitialized value of whatever happened to be there, on the stack.

The patch that fixes this problem looks like this (with some names shortened to simplify but keep the idea):

- res = random(data, (char *)&rnd, sizeof(rnd));
+ res = random(data, (char *)rnd, sizeof(*rnd));

So yeah. I introduced this security flaw in 7.52.0. We had it fixed in 7.52.1, released roughly 48 hours later.

(I really do not need comments on what other languages that wouldn’t have allowed this mistake or otherwise would’ve brought us world peace a long time ago.)

Make it not happen again

The primary way to make this same mistake not happen again easily, is that I’m removing the valgrind report parsing function from the test suite and we will now instead assume that valgrind reports will be legitimate and if not, work on suppressing the false positives in a better way.

References

This flaw is officially known as CVE-2016-9594

The real commit that fixed this problem is here, or as stand-alone patch.

The full security advisory for this flaw is here: https://curl.haxx.se/docs/adv_20161223.html

Facepalm photo by Alex E. Proimos.

xkcd: 221

cURL and libcurl

curl man page disentangled

The nroff formatted source file to the man page for the curl command line tool was some 110K and consisted of more than 2500 lines by the time this overhaul, or disentanglement if you will, started. At the moment of me writing this, the curl version in git right now, supports 204 command line options.

Working with such a behemoth of a document has gotten a bit daunting to people and the nroff formatting itself is quirky and esoteric. For some time I’ve also been interested in creating some sort of system that would allow us to generate a single web page for each individual command line option. And then possibly allow for expanded descriptions in those single page versions.

To avoid having duplicated info, I decided to create a new system in which we can document each individual command line option in a separate file and from that collection of hundreds of files we can generate the big man page, we can generate the “curl –help” output and we can create all those separate pages suitable for use to render web pages. And we can automate some of the nroff syntax to make it less error-prone and cause less sore eyes for the document editors!

With this system we also get a unified handling of things added in certain curl versions, affecting only specific protocols or dealing with references like “see also” mentions. It gives us a whole lot of meta-data for the command line options if you will and this will allow us to do more fun things going forward I’m sure.

You’ll find the the new format documented, and you can check out the existing files to get a quick glimpse on how it works. As an example, look at the –resolve documentation source.

Today I generated the first full curl.1 replacement and pushed to git, but eventually that file will be removed from git and instead generated at build time by the regular build system. No need to commit a generated file in the long term.

cURL and libcurl, Development, Haxx, Mozilla, Open Source

2nd best in Sweden

7 Comments

“Probably the only person in the whole of Sweden whose code is used by all people in the world using a computer / smartphone / ATM / etc … every day. His contribution to the world is so large that it is impossible to understand the breadth. “

(translated motivation from the Swedish original page)

Thank you everyone who nominated me. I’m truly grateful, honored and humbled. You, my community, is what makes me keep doing what I do. I love you all!

To list “Sweden’s best developers” (the list and site is in Swedish) seems like a rather futile task, doesn’t it? Yet that’s something the Swedish IT and technology news site Techworld has been doing occasionally for the last several years. With two, three year intervals since 2008.

Everyone reading this will of course immediately start to ponder on what developers they speak of or how they define developers and how on earth do you judge who the best developers are? Or even who’s included in the delimiter “Sweden” – is that people living in Sweden, born in Sweden or working in Sweden?

I’m certainly not alone in having chuckled to these lists when they have been published in the past, as I’ve never seen anyone on the list be even close to my own niche or areas of interest. The lists have even worked a little as a long-standing joke in places.

It always felt as if the people on the lists were found on another planet than mine – mostly just Java and .NET people. and they very rarely appeared to be developers who actually spend their days surrounded by code and programming. I suppose I’ve now given away some clues to some characteristics I think “a developer” should posses…

This year, their fifth time doing this list, they changed the way they find candidates, opened up for external nominations and had a set of external advisors. This also resulted in me finding several friends on the list that were never on it in the past.

Tonight I got called onto the stage during the little award ceremony and I was handed this diploma and recognition for landing at second place in the best developer in Sweden list.

img_20161201_192510

And just to keep things safe for the future, this is how the listing looks on the Swedish list page:

2nd-best-developer-2016

Yes I’m happy and proud and humbled. I don’t get this kind of recognition every day so I’ll take this opportunity and really enjoy it. And I’ll find a good spot for my diploma somewhere around the house.

I’ll keep a really big smile on my face for the rest of the day for sure!

best-dev-2016

(Photo from the award ceremony by Emmy Jonsson/IDG)

Update

The winner was Joel Ambrahansson, in the middle on the photo above, and on third place and on the right in the photo is Mina Nakicenovic.

cURL and libcurl, Firefox

HTTPS proxy with curl

1 Comment

Starting in version 7.52.0 (due to ship December 21, 2016), curl will support HTTPS proxies when doing network transfers, and by doing this it joins the small exclusive club of HTTP user-agents consisting of Firefox, Chrome and not too many others.

Yes you read this correctly. This is different than the good old HTTP proxy.

HTTPS proxy means that the client establishes a TLS connection to the proxy and then communicates over that, which is different to the normal and traditional HTTP proxy approach where the clients speak plain HTTP to the proxy.

Talking HTTPS to your proxy is a privacy improvement as it prevents people from snooping on your proxy communication. Even when using HTTPS over a standard HTTP proxy, there’s typically a setting up phase first that leaks information about where the connection is being made, user credentials and more. Not to mention that an HTTPS proxy makes HTTP traffic “safe” to and from the proxy. HTTPS to the proxy also enables clients to speak HTTP/2 more easily with proxies. (Even though HTTP/2 to the proxy is not yet supported in curl.)

In the case where a client wants to talk HTTPS to a remote server, when using a HTTPS proxy, it sends HTTPS through HTTPS.

Illustrating this concept with images. When using a traditional HTTP proxy, we connect initially to the proxy with HTTP in the clear, and then from then on the HTTPS makes it safe:

HTTP proxyto compare with the HTTPS proxy case where the connection is safe already in the first step:

HTTPS proxyThe access to the proxy is made over network A. That network has traditionally been a corporate network or within a LAN or something but we’re seeing more and more use cases where the proxy is somewhere on the Internet and then “Network A” is really huge. That includes use cases where the proxy for example compresses images or otherwise reduces bandwidth requirements.

Actual HTTPS connections from clients to servers are still done end to end encrypted even in the HTTP proxy case. HTTP traffic to and from the user to the web site however, will still be HTTPS protected to the proxy when a HTTPS proxy is used.

A complicated pull request

This awesome work was provided by Dmitry Kurochkin, Vasy Okhin, and Alex Rousskov. It was merged into master on November 24 in this commit.

Doing this sort of major change in the TLS area in curl code is a massive undertaking, much so because of the fact that curl supports getting built with one out of 11 or 12 different TLS libraries. Several of those are also system-specific so hardly any single developer can even build all these backends on his or hers own machines.

In addition to the TLS backend maze, curl and library also offers a huge amount of different options to control the TLS connection and handling. You can switch on and off features, provide certificates, CA bundles and more. Adding another layer of TLS pretty much doubles the amount of options since now you can tweak everything both in the TLS connection to the proxy as well as the one to the remote peer.

This new feature is supported with the OpenSSL, GnuTLS and NSS backends to start with.

Consider it experimental for now

By all means, go ahead and use it and torture the code and file issues for everything bad you see, but I think we make ourselves a service by considering this new feature set to be a bit experimental in this release.

New options

There’s a whole forest of new command line and libcurl options to control all the various aspects of the new TLS connection this introduces. Since it is a totally separate connection it gets a whole set of options that are basically identical to the server connection but with a –proxy prefix instead. Here’s a list:

  --proxy-cacert 
  --proxy-capath
  --proxy-cert
  --proxy-cert-type
  --proxy-ciphers
  --proxy-crlfile
  --proxy-insecure
  --proxy-key
  --proxy-key-type
  --proxy-pass
  --proxy-ssl-allow-beast
  --proxy-sslv2
  --proxy-sslv3
  --proxy-tlsv1
  --proxy-tlsuser
  --proxy-tlspassword
  --proxy-tlsauthtype
cURL and libcurl, Mozilla, Security

curl security audit

6 Comments

“the overall impression of the state of security and robustness
of the cURL library was positive.”

I asked for, and we were granted a security audit of curl from the Mozilla Secure Open Source program a while ago. This was done by Mozilla getting a 3rd party company involved to do the job and footing the bill for it. The auditing company is called Cure53.

good_curl_logoI applied for the security audit because I feel that we’ve had some security related issues lately and I’ve had the feeling that we might be missing something so it would be really good to get some experts’ eyes on the code. Also, as curl is one of the most used software components in the world a serious problem in curl could have a serious impact on tools, devices and applications everywhere. We don’t want that to happen.

Scans and tests and all

We run static analyzers on the code frequently with a zero warnings tolerance. The daily clang-analyzer scan hasn’t found a problem in a long time and the Coverity once-every-few-weeks occasionally finds something suspicious but we always fix those immediately.

We have  thousands of tests and unit tests that we run non-stop on the code on multiple platforms running multiple build combinations. We also use valgrind when running tests to verify memory use and check for potential memory leaks.

Secrecy

The audit itself. The report and the work on fixing the issues were all done on closed mailing lists without revealing to the world what was really going on. All as our fine security process describes.

There are several downsides with fixing things secretly. One of the primary ones is that we get much fewer eyes on the fixes and there aren’t that many people involved when discussing solutions or approaches to the issues at hand. Another is that our test infrastructure is made for and runs only public code so the code can’t really be fully tested until it is merged into the public git repository.

The report

We got the report on September 23, 2016 and it certainly gave us a lot of work.

The audit report has now been made public and is a very interesting work if you’re into security, C code and curl hacking. I find the report very clear, well written and it spells out each problem very accurately and even shows proof of concept code snippets and exploit examples to drive the points home.

Quoted from the report intro:

As for the approach, the test was rooted in the public availability of the source code belonging to the cURL software and the investigation involved five testers of the Cure53 team. The tool was tested over the course of twenty days in August and September of 2016 and main efforts were focused on examining cURL 7.50.1. and later versions of cURL. It has to be noted that rather than employ fuzzing or similar approaches to validate the robustness of the build of the application and library, the latter goal was pursued through a classic source code audit. Sources covering authentication, various protocols, and, partly, SSL/TLS, were analyzed in considerable detail. A rationale behind this type of scoping pointed to these parts of the cURL tool that were most likely to be prone and exposed to real-life attack scenarios. Rounding up the methodology of the classic code audit, Cure53 benefited from certain tools, which included ASAN targeted with detecting memory errors, as well as Helgrind, which was tasked with pinpointing synchronization errors with the threading model.

They identified no less than twenty-three (23) potential problems in the code, out of which nine were deemed security vulnerabilities. But I’d also like to emphasize that they did also actually say this:

At the same time, the overall impression of the state of security and robustness of the cURL library was positive.

Resolving problems

In the curl security team we decided to downgrade one of the 9 vulnerabilities to a “plain bug” since the required attack scenario was very complicated and the risk deemed small, and two of the issues we squashed into treating them as a single one. That left us with 7 security vulnerabilities. Whoa, that’s a lot. The largest amount we’ve ever fixed in a single release before was 4.

I consider handling security issues in the project to be one of my most important tasks; pretty much all other jobs are down-prioritized in comparison. So with a large queue of security work, a lot of bug fixing and work on features basically had to halt.

You can get a fairly detailed description of our work on fixing the issues in the fix and validation log. The report, the log and the advisories we’ve already posted should cover enough details about these problems and associated fixes that I don’t feel a need to write about them much further.

More problems

Just because we got our hands full with an audit report doesn’t mean that the world stops, right? While working on the issues one by one to have them fixed we also ended up getting an additional 4 security issues to add to the set, by three independent individuals.

All these issues gave me a really busy period and it felt great when we finally shipped 7.51.0 and announced all those eleven fixes to the world and I could get a short period of relief until the next tsunami hits.