Category Archives: Web

web stuff

cURL and libcurl, Network, Web

curl and proxy headers

Starting in the next curl release, 7.37.0, the curl tool supports the new command line option –proxy-header. (Completely merged at this commit.)

It works exactly like –header does, but will only include the headers in requests sent to a proxy, while the opposite is true for –header: that will only be sent in requests that will go to the end server. But of course, if you use a HTTP proxy and do a normal GET for example, curl will include headers for both the proxy and the server in the request. The bigger difference is when using CONNECT to a proxy, which then only will use proxy headers.

libcurl

For libcurl, the story is slightly different and more complicated since we’re having things backwards compatible there. The new libcurl still works exactly like the former one by default.

CURLOPT_PROXYHEADER is the new option that is the new proxy header option that should be set up exactly like CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER is

CURLOPT_HEADEROPT is then what an application uses to set how libcurl should use the two header options. Again, by default libcurl will keep working like before and use the CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER list in all HTTP requests. To change that behavior and use the new functionality instead, set CURLOPT_HEADEROPT to CURLHEADER_SEPARATE.

Then, the header lists will be handled as separate. An application can then switch back to the old behavior with a unified header list by using CURLOPT_HEADEROPT set to CURLHEADER_UNIFIED.

Mail, Web

groups.google.com hates greylisting

3 Comments

Dear Google,

Here’s a Wikipedia article for you: Greylisting.

After you’ve read that, then consider the error message I always get for my groups.google.com account when you disable mail sending to me due to “bouncing”:

Bounce status Your email address is currently flagged as bouncing. For additional information or to correct this, view your email status here [link].

Following that link I get to read the reason:

“Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain haxx.se by [mailserver]. The error that the other server returned was: 451 4.7.1 Greylisting in action, please come back later”

See, even the error message spells out what it is all about!

Thanks to this feature of Google groups, I cannot participate in any such lists/groups for as long as I keep my greylisting activated since it’ll keep disabling mail delivery to me.

Enabling greylisting decreased my spam flood to roughly a third of the previous volume (and now I’m at 500-1000 spam emails/day) so I’m not ready to disable it yet. I just have to not use google groups.

Update: I threw in the towel and I now whitelist google.com servers to get around this problem…

cURL and libcurl, Network, Open Source, Web

http2 in curl

While the first traces of http2 support in curl was added already back in September 2013 it hasn’t been until recently it actually was made useful. There’s been a lot of http2 related activities in the curl team recently and in the late January 2014 we could run our first command line inter-op tests against public http2 (draft-09) servers on the Internet.

There’s a lot to be said about http2 for those not into its nitty gritty details, but I’ll focus on the curl side of this universe in this blog post. I’ll do separate posts and presentations on http2 “internals” later.

A quick http2 overview

http2 (without the minor version, as per what the IETF work group has decided on) is a binary protocol that allows many logical streams multiplexed over the same physical TCP connection, it features compressed headers in both directions and it has stream priorities and more. It is being designed to maintain the user concepts and paradigms from HTTP 1.1 so web sites don’t have to change contents and web authors won’t need to relearn a lot. The web will not break because of http2, it will just magically work a little better, a little smoother and a little faster.

In libcurl we build http2 support with the help of the excellent library called nghttp2, which takes care of all the binary protocol details for us. You’ll also have to build it with a new enough version of the SSL library of your choice, as http2 over TLS will require use of some fairly recent TLS extensions that not many older releases have and several TLS libraries still completely lack!

The need for an extension is because with speaking TLS over port 443 which HTTPS implies, the current and former web infrastructure assumes that we will speak HTTP 1.1 over that, while we now want to be able to instead say we want to talk http2. When Google introduced SPDY then pushed for a new extension called NPN to do this, which when taken through the standardization in IETF has been forked, changed and renamed to ALPN with roughly the same characteristics (I don’t know the specific internals so I’ll stick to how they appear from the outside).

So, NPN and especially ALPN are fairly recent TLS extensions so you need a modern enough SSL library to get that support. OpenSSL and NSS both support NPN and ALPN with a recent enough version, while GnuTLS only supports ALPN. You can build libcurl to use any of these threes libraries to get it to talk http2 over TLS.

http2 using libcurl

(This still describes what’s in curl’s git repository, the first release to have this level of http2 support is the upcoming 7.36.0 release.)

Users of libcurl who want to enable http2 support will only have to set CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION to CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_0 and that’s it. It will make libcurl try to use http2 for the HTTP requests you do with that handle.

For HTTP URLs, this will make libcurl send a normal HTTP 1.1 request with an offer to the server to upgrade the connection to version 2 instead. If it does, libcurl will continue using http2 in the clear on the connection and if it doesn’t, it’ll continue using HTTP 1.1 on it. This mode is what Firefox and Chrome will not support.

For HTTPS URLs, libcurl will use NPN and ALPN as explained above and offer to speak http2 and if the server supports it. there will be http2 sweetness from than point onwards. Or it selects HTTP 1.1 and then that’s what will be used. The latter is also what will be picked if the server doesn’t support ALPN and NPN.

Alt-Svc and ALTSVC are new things planned to show up in time for http2 draft-11 so we haven’t really thought through how to best support them and provide their features in the libcurl API. Suggestions (and patches!) are of course welcome!

http2 with curl

Hardly surprising, the curl command line tool also has this power. You use the –http2 command line option to switch on the libcurl behavior as described above.

Translated into old-style

To reduce transition pains and problems and to work with the rest of the world to the highest possible degree, libcurl will (decompress and) translate received http2 headers into http 1.1 style headers so that applications and users will get a stream of headers that look very much the way you’re used to and it will produce an initial response line that says HTTP 2.0 blabla.

Building (lib)curl to support http2

See the README.http2 file in the lib/ directory.

This is still a draft version of http2!

I just want to make this perfectly clear: http2 is not out “for real” yet. We have tried our http2 support somewhat at the draft-09 level and Tatsuhiro has worked on the draft-10 support in nghttp2. I expect there to be at least one more draft, but perhaps even more, before http2 becomes an official RFC. We hope to be able to stay on the frontier of http2 and deliver support for the most recent draft going forward.

PS. If you try any of this and experience any sort of problems, please speak to us on the curl-library mailing list and help us smoothen out whatever problem you got!

cURL

Network, Web

HTTP2 – the next step

IETFThe HTTPbis working group of the IETF had an interim meeting in Zurich January 22nd to 24th. I participated from remote and I listened in on the discussions over webex and followed the jabber room while the meetings were going on, addressing HTTP2 protocol issues one by one ironing out quirks and progressing forward.

I won’t bore you with details why I wasn’t present in Zurich.

Here’s a couple of quick and brief reflections from my perspective:

Listening in from remote like this is not at all adequately compensating for not being there. A room full of people discussing something is really hard to follow from remote and completely impossible to interact with. It is better than not being able to listen in at all, but it is certainly not a replacement for being there.

It is amazing how much faster people can come to conclusions and fix issues when being in the same room. Issues that have been lingering in the tracker for a very long time could be dealt with and closed within minutes. Things like what to call the protocol in ALPN or to remove the ability to switched off flow control. Not all issues of course…

HTTP2 draft-09 that soon will become draft-10 to reflect the updates from this meeting and more, is from my perspective quite far in its process. It is clearly at a point that seems to be OK with most people and the discussions are now just about details. Of course the devil is in the details and I’m not saying it can’t take a long time to settle on them, but the structure and main concepts of the protocol are probably now established.

There were not very many proxy or server people at the interim. Most of the people seemed to be client-side oriented and some service oriented. I’m personally client-side biased myself but I hope this doesn’t lead to us deciding on things that the “other side” will have problems with down the line.

Firefox nightly supports HTTP2 draft-09 (for https:// URLs) and twitter supports it server side. Enable it in the browser by entering “about:config” in the URL bar and change the config entry called “network.http.spdy.enabled.http2draft” to true. Done.

Some of the biggest HTTP2 changes brought up compared to what draft-09 says include:

  • no more ability to switch off flow control
  • the prioritization field/concept “weighted dependency tree approach”
  • >= TLS 1.2 with ephemeral ciphers
  • MUST not use TLS compression
  • tolerant to TLS false start or at least must accept/buffer application layer data
  • padding

There was also a whole lot of discussions about TLS for http:// urls, proxys, MITM for SSL, opportunistic encryption and more but I believe most of those issues remained at the same position as before – I missed out on parts of the last afternoon so I may have missed some details. It’ll all be revealed in draft-10 and the mailing list I’m sure!

Update: the minutes from the interim meeting.

http2-drawing

cURL and libcurl, Haxx, Network, Open Source, Web

I go Mozilla

4 Comments

Mozilla dinosaur head logo

In January 2014, I start working for Mozilla

I’ve worked in open source projects for some 20 years and I’ve maintained curl and libcurl for over 15 years. I’m an internet protocol geek at heart and Mozilla seems like a perfect place for me to continue to explore this interest of mine and combine it with real open source in its purest form.

I plan to use my experiences from all my years of protocol fiddling and making stuff work on different platforms against random server implementations into the networking team at Mozilla and work on improving Firefox and more.

I’m putting my current embedded Linux focus to the side and I plunge into a worldwide known company with worldwide known brands to do open source within the internet protocols I enjoy so much. I’ll be working out of my home, just outside Stockholm Sweden. Mozilla has no office in my country and I have no immediate plans of moving anywhere (with a family, kids and all established here).

I intend to bring my mindset on protocols and how to do things well into the Mozilla networking stack and world and I hope and expect that I will get inspiration and input from Mozilla and take that back and further improve curl over time. My agreement with Mozilla also gives me a perfect opportunity to increase my commitment to curl and curl development. I want to maintain and possibly increase my involvement in IETF and the httpbis work with http2 and related stuff. With one foot in Firefox and one in curl going forward, I think I may have a somewhat unique position and attitude toward especially HTTP.

I’ve not yet met another Swedish Mozillian but I know I’m not the only one located in Sweden. I guess I now have a reason to look them up and say hello when suitable.

Björn and Linus will continue to drive and run Haxx with me taking a step back into the shadows (Haxx-wise). I’ll still be part of the collective Haxx just as I was for many years before I started working full-time for Haxx in 2009. My email address, my sites etc will remain on haxx.se.

I’m looking forward to 2014!

cURL and libcurl, Open Source, Web

dotdot removal in libcurl 7.32.0

Allow as much as possible and only sanitize what’s absolutely necessary.

That has basically been the rule for the URL parser in curl and libcurl since the project was started in the 90s. The upside with this is that you can use curl to torture your web servers with tests and you can handicraft really imaginary stuff to send and thus subsequently to receive. It kind of assumes that the user truly gives curl a URL the user wants to use.

Why would you give curl a broken URL?

But of course life and internet protocols, and perhaps in particular HTTP, is more involved than that. It soon becomes more complicated.

Redirects

Everyone who’s writing a web user-agent based on RFC 2616 soon faces the fact that redirects based on the Location: header is a source of fun and head-scratching. It is defined in the spec as only allowing “absolute URLs” but the reality is that they were also provided as relative ones by web servers already from the start so the browsers of course support that (and the pending HTTPbis document is already making this clear). curl thus also adopted support for relative URLs, meaning the ability to “merge” or “add” a relative URL onto a previously used absolute one had to be implemented. And even illegally constructed URLs are done this way and in the grand tradition of web browsers, they have not tried to stop users from doing bad things, they have instead adapted and now instead try to convert it to what the user could’ve meant. Like for example using a white space within the URL you send in a Location: header. Even curl has to sanitize that so that it works more like the browsers.

Relative path segments

The path part of URLs are truly to be seen as a path, in that it is a hierarchical scheme where each slash-separated part adds a piece. Like “/first/second/third.html”

As it turns out, you can also include modifiers in the path that have special meanings. Like the “..” (two dots or periods next to each other) known from shells and command lines to mean “one directory level up” can also be used in the path part of a URL like “/one/three/../two/three.html” which equals “/one/two/three.html” when the dotdot sequence is handled. This dot removal procedure is documented in the generic URL specification RFC 3986 (published January 2005) and is completely protocol agnostic. It works like this for HTTP, FTP and every other protocol you provide a path part for.

In its traditional spirit of just accepting and passing along, curl didn’t use to treat “dotdots” in any particular way but handed it over to the server to deal with. There probably aren’t that terribly many such occurrences either so it never really caused any problems or made any users hit any particular walls (or they were too shy to report it); until one day back in February this year… so we finally had to do something about this. Some 8 years after the spec saying it must be done was released.

dotdot removal

Alas, libcurl 7.32.0 now features (once it gets released around August 12th) full traversal and handling of such sequences in the path part of URLs. It also includes single dot sequences like in “/one/./two”. libcurl will detect such uses and convert the path to a sequence without them and continue on. This of course will cause a limited altered behavior for the possible small portion of users out there in the world who would use dotdot sequences and actually want them to get sent as-is the way libcurl has been doing it. I decided against adding an option for disabling this behavior, but of course if someone would experience terrible pain and can reported about it convincingly to us we could possible reconsider that decision in the future.

I suspect (and hope) this will just be another little change along the way that will make libcurl act more standard and more like the browsers and thus cause less problems to users but without people much having to care about how or why.

Further reading: the dotdot.c file from the libcurl source tree!

Bonus kit

A dot to dot surprise drawing for you and your kids (click for higher resolution)

curl dot-to-dot

cURL and libcurl, Security, Web

tailmatching them cookies

A brand new libcurl security advisory was announced on April 12th, which details how libcurl can leak cookies to domains with tailmatch. Let me explain the details.

(Did I mention that security is hard?)

cookiecurl first implemented cookie support way back in the early days in the late 90s. I participated in the IETF work that much later documented how cookies work in real life. I know how cookies work, and yet this flaw still existed in the curl cookie implementation for over 13 years. Until someone spotted it. And once again that sense of gaaaah, how come we never saw this before!! came over me.

A quick cookie 101

When cookies are used over HTTP, it is (if we simplify things a little) only a name = value pair that is set to be valid a certain domain and a path. But the path is only specifying the prefix, and the domain only specifies the tail part. This means that a site can set a cookie that is for the entire site that is under the path /members so that it will be sent by the brower even for /members/names/ as well as for /members/profile/me etc. The cookie will then not be sent to the same domain for pages under a different path, such as /logout or similar.

A domain for a cookie can set to be valid for example.org and then it will be sent by the browser also for www.example.org and www.sub.example.org but not at all for example.com or badexample.org.

Unless of course you have a bug in the cookie tailmatching function. The bug libcurl had until 7.30.0 was released made it send cookies for the domain example.org also to sites that would have the same tail but a different prefix. Like badexample.org.

Let me try a story on you

It might not be obvious at first glance how terrible this can become to users. Let me take you through an imaginary story, backed up by some facts:

Imagine that there’s a known web site out there on the internet that provides an email service to users. Users login on a form and they read email. Or perhaps it is a social site. Preferably for our story, the site is using HTTP only but this trick can be done for most HTTPS sites as well with only a mildly bigger effort.

This known and popular site runs its services on ‘site.com’. When you’re logged in to site.com, your session is a cookie that keeps getting sent to the server and the server sometimes updates the contents and sends it back to the browser. This is the way millions of sites work.

As an evil person, you now register a domain and setup an attack server. You register a domain that has the same ending as the legitimate site. You call your domain ‘fun-cat-and-food-pics-from-site.com’ (FCAFPFS among friends).

anattackMr evil person also knows that there are several web browsers, typically special purpose ones for different kinds of devices, that use libcurl as its base. (But it doesn’t have to be a browser, it could be other tools as well but for this story a browser fits fine.) Lets say you know a person or two who use one of those browsers on site.com.

You send a phishing email to these persons. Or post a funny picture on the social site. The idea is to have them click your link to follow through to your funny FCAFPFS site. A little social engineering, who on the internet can truly resist funny cats?

The visitor’s browser (which uses a vulnerable libcurl) does the wrong “tailmatch” on the domain for the session cookie and gladly hands it off to the attacker site. The attacker site could then use that cookie to access site.com and hijack the user’s session. Quite likely the attacker would immediately change password or something and logout/login so that the innocent user who’s off looking at cats will get a “you are logged-out” message when he/she returns to site.com…

The attacker could then use “password reminder” features on other sites to get emails sent to site.com to allow him to continue attacking the user’s other accounts on other services. Or if site.com was a social site, the attacker would post more cat links and harvest more accounts etc…

End of story.

Any process improvements?

For every security vulnerability a project gets, it should be a reason for scrutinizing what went wrong. I don’t mean in the actual code necessarily, but more what processes we lack that made the bug sneak in and remain in there for so long without being detected.

What didn’t we do that made this bug survive this long?

Obviously we didn’t review the code properly. But this is a tricky beast that was added a very long time ago, back in the days when the project was young and not that many developers were involved. Before we even had a test suite. I do believe that we have slightly better reviews these days, but I will also claim that it is far from sure that we would detect this flaw by a sheer code review.

Test cases! We clearly lacked the necessary test case setup that tested the limitations of how cookies are supposed to work and get sent back and forth. We’ve added a few new ones now that detect this particular flaw fine, but I think we have reasons to continue to search for various kinds of negative tests we should do. Involving cookies of course, but also generally in other areas of the curl project.

Of course, we’re all just working voluntarily here on spare time so we can’t expect miracles.

(an attack, picture by Andy Gardner)
cURL and libcurl, Network, Web

Better pipelining in libcurl 7.30.0

2 Comments

Back in October 2006, we added support for HTTP pipelining to libcurl. The implementation was naive and simple: it basically preferred to pipeline everything on the single connection to a given host if it could. It works only with the multi interface and if you do a second request to the same host it will try to pipeline that.

pipelines

Over the years the feature was bugfixed and improved slightly, which proved that at least a couple of applications actually used it – but it was never any particularly big hit among libcurl’s vast amount of features.

Related background information that gives details on some of the problems with pipelining in the wild can be found in Mark Nottingham’s Making HTTP Pipelining Usable on the Open Web internet-draft, Mozilla’s bug report “HTTP pipelining by default” and Chrome’s pipelining docs.

Now, more than six years later, Linus Nielsen Feltzing (a colleague and friend at Haxx) strikes back with a much improved and almost completely revamped HTTP pipelining support (merged into master just hours before the new-feature window closed for the pending 7.30.0 release). This time, the implementation features and provides:

  • a configurable number of connections and pipelines to each unique host name
  • a round-robin approach that favors starting new connections first, and then pipeline on existing connections once the maximum number of connections to the host is reached
  • a max-depth value that when filled makes the code not add any more requests on that connection/pipeline
  • a pipe penalization system that avoids adding new requests to pipes that are known to be receiving very large contents and thus possibly would stall subsequent requests for an extended period of time
  • a server blacklist that allows the application to specify a list of servers for which HTTP pipelining should not be attempted – real world tests has proven that some servers are too broken to be allowed to play the game

The code also adds a feature that helps out applications to do massive amount of requests in a controlled manner:

A hard maximum amount of connections, that when reached makes libcurl queue up easy handles internally until they can create a new connection or re-use a previously used one. That allows an application to for example set the limit to 50 and then add 400 handles to the multi handle but it will still only use 50 connections as a maximum so over time when requests get completed it will start new transfers on the requests that are waiting in line and thus shrinking the queue and keeping the maximum amount of connections until there’s less than 50 left to do…

Previously that kind of queuing had to be done by the application itself, but now with the much more extensive pipelining support it really isn’t as easy for an application to know when the new request can get pipelined or create a new connection so this logic is now provided by libcurl itself. It is likely going to be appreciated and used also by non-pipelining applications…

This implementation is accompanied with a bunch of new test cases for libcurl (and even a new HTTP test server for the purpose), and it has been tested in the wild for a while with libcurl as the engine in a web browser implementation (the company doing that has requested to remain anonymous). We believe it is in fairly decent state, but as this is a large step and the first release it is shipped with I expect there to be some hiccups along the way.

Two things to take note of:

  1. pipelining is only available for users of libcurl’s multi interface, and only if explicitly enabled with CURLMOPT_PIPELINING
  2. the curl command line tool does not use the multi interface and thus it will not use pipelining
cURL and libcurl, Development, Open Source, Web

The curl year 2012

1 Comment
2012

So what did happen in the curl project during 2012?

First some basic stats

We shipped 6 releases with 199 identified bug fixes and some 40 other changes. That makes on average 33 bug fixes shipped every 61st day or a little over one bug fix done every second day. All this done with about 1000 commits to the git repository, which is roughly the same amount of git activity as 2010 and 2011. We merged commits from 72 different authors, which is a slight increase from the 62 in 2010 and 68 in 2011.

On our main development mailing list, the curl-library list, we now have 1300 subscribers and during 2012 it got about 3500 postings from almost 500 different From addresses. To no surprise, I posted by far the largest amount of mails there (847) with the number two poster being Günter Knauf who posted 151 times. Four more members posted more than 100 times: Steve Holme (145), Dan Fandrich (131), Marc Hoersken (130) and Yang Tse (107). Last year I sent 1175 mails to the same list…

Notable events

I’ve walked through the biggest changes and fixes and here are the particular ones I found stood out during this otherwise rather calm and laid back curl year. Possibly in a rough order of importance…

  1. We started the year with two security vulnerability announcements, regarding an SSL weakness and an injection flaw. They were reported in 2011 though and we didn’t get any further security alerts during 2012 which I think is good. Or a sign that nobody has been looking close enough…
  2. We got two interesting additions in the SSL backend department almost simultaneously. We got native Windows support with the use of the schannel subsystem and we got native Mac OS X support with the use of Darwin SSL. Thanks to these, we can now offer SSL-enabled libcurls on those operating systems without relying on third party SSL libraries.
  3. The VERIFYHOST debacle took off with “security researchers” throwing accusations and insults, ending with us releasing a curl release with the bug removed. It did however unfortunately lead to some follow-up problems in for example the PHP binding.
  4. During the autumn, the brokeness of WSApoll was identified, and we now build libcurl without it and as a result libcurl now works better on Windows!
  5. In an attempt to allow libcurl-using applications to avoid select() and its problems, we introduced the new public function curl_multi_wait. It avoids the FD_SETSIZE limit and makes it harder to screw up…
  6. The overly bloated User-Agent string for the curl tool was dramatically shortened when we cut out all the subsystems/libraries and their version numbers from the string. Now there’s only curl and its version number left. Nice and clean.
  7. In July we finally introduced metalink support in the curl tool with the curl 7.27.0 release. It’s been one of those things we’ve discussed for ages that finally came through and became reality.
  8. With the brand new HTTP CONNECT support in the test suite we suddenly could get much improved test cases that does SSL or just tunnel through an HTTP proxy with the CONNECT request. It of course helps us avoid regressions and otherwise improve curl and libcurl.

What didn’t happen

  1. I made an attempt to get the spindly hacking going, but I’ve mostly failed with that effort. I have personally not had enough time and energy to work on it, and the interest from the rest of the world seems luke warm at best.
  2. HTTP pipelining. Linus Nielsen Feltzing has a patch series in the works with a much improved pipelining support for libcurl. I’ll write a separate post about it once it gets in. Obviously we failed to merge it before the end of the year.
  3. Some of my friends like to mock me about curl not being completely IPv6 friendly due to its lack of support for Happy Eyeballs, and of course they’re right. Making curl just do two connects on IPv6-enabled machines should be a fairly small change but yet I haven’t yet managed to get into actually implementing it…
  4. DANE is SSL cert verification with records from DNS thanks to DNSSEC. Firefox has some experiments going and Chrome already supports it. This is a technology that truly can improve HTTPS going forwards and allow us to avoid the annoyingly weak and broken CA model…

I won’t promise that any of these will happen during 2013 but I can promise there will be efforts…

The Future

I wrote a separate post a short while ago about the HTTP2 progress, and I expect 2013 to bring much more details and discussions in that area. Will we get SRV record support soon? Or perhaps even URI records? Will some of the recent discussions about new HTTP auth schemes develop into something that will reach the internet in the coming year?

In libcurl we will switch to an internal design that is purely non-blocking with a lot of if-then-that-else source code removed for checks which interface that is used. I’ll make a follow-up post with details about that as well as soon as it actually happens.

Our Responsibility

curl and libcurl are considered pillars in the internet world by now. This year I’ve heard from several places by independent sources how people consider support by curl to be an important driver for internet technology. As long as we don’t have it, it hasn’t really reached everyone and that things won’t get adopted for real in the Internet community until curl has it supported. As father of the project it makes me proud and humble, but I also feel the responsibility of making sure that we continue to do the right thing the right way.

I also realize that this position of ours is not automatically glued to us, we need to keep up the good stuff to make it stick.

cURL