Tag Archives: Wireshark

cURL and libcurl, Network

qlog with curl

I want curl to be on the very bleeding edge of protocol development to aid the Internet protocol development community to test out protocols early and to work out kinks in the protocols and server implementations using curl’s vast set of tools and switches.

For this, curl supported HTTP/2 really early on and helped shaping the protocol and testing out servers.

For this reason, curl supports HTTP/3 already since August 2019. A convenient and well-known client that you can then use to poke on your brand new HTTP/3 servers too and we can work on getting all the rough edges smoothed out before the protocol is reaching its final state.

QUIC tooling

One of the many challenges QUIC and HTTP/3 have is that with a new transport protocol comes entirely new paradigms. With new paradigms like this, we need improved or perhaps even new tools to help us understand the network flows back and forth, to make sure we all have a common understanding of the protocols and to make sure we implement our end-points correctly.

QUIC only exists as an encrypted-only protocol, meaning that we can no longer easily monitor and passively investigate network traffic like before, QUIC also encrypts more of the protocol than TCP + TLS do, leaving even less for an outsider to see.

The current QUIC analyzer tool lineup gives us two options.

Wireshark

We all of course love Wireshark and if you get a very recent version, you’ll be able to decrypt and view QUIC network data.

With curl, and a few other clients, you can ask to get the necessary TLS secrets exported at run-time with the SSLKEYLOGFILE environment variable. You’ll then be able to see every bit in every packet. This way to extract secrets works with QUIC as well as with the traditional TCP+TLS based protocols.

qvis/qlog

The qvis/qlog site. If you find the Wireshark network view a little bit too low level and leaving a lot for you to understand and draw conclusions from, the next-level tool here is the common QUIC logging format called qlog. This is an agreed-upon common standard to log QUIC traffic, which the accompanying qvis web based visualizer tool that lets you upload your logs and get visualizations generated. This becomes extra powerful if you have logs from both ends!

Starting with this commit (landed in the git master branch on May 7, 2020), all curl builds that support HTTP/3 – independent of what backend you pick – can be told to output qlogs.

Enable qlogging in curl by setting the new standard environment variable QLOGDIR to point to a directory in which you want qlogs to be generated. When you run curl then, you’ll get files creates in there named as [hex digits].log, where the hex digits is the “SCID” (Source Connection Identifier).

Credits

qlog and qvis are spear-headed by Robin Marx. qlogging for curl with Quiche was pushed for by Lucas Pardue and Alessandro Ghedini. In the ngtcp2 camp, Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa made it very easy for me to switch it on in curl.

The top image is snapped from the demo sample on the qvis web site.

cURL and libcurl, Firefox, Network, Security

Inspect curl’s TLS traffic

Since a long time back, the venerable network analyzer tool Wireshark (screenshot above) has provided a way to decrypt and inspect TLS traffic when sent and received by Firefox and Chrome.

You do this by making the browser tell Wireshark the SSL secrets:

  1. set the environment variable named SSLKEYLOGFILE to a file name of your choice before you start the browser
  2. Setting the same file name path in the Master-secret field in Wireshark. Go to Preferences->Protocols->SSL and edit the path as shown in the screenshot below.

Having done this simple operation, you can now inspect your browser’s HTTPS traffic in Wireshark. Just super handy and awesome.

Just remember that if you record TLS traffic and want to save it for analyzing later, you need to also save the file with the secrets so that you can decrypt that traffic capture at a later time as well.

curl

Adding curl to the mix. curl can be built using a dozen different TLS libraries and not just a single one as the browsers do. It complicates matters a bit.

In the NSS library for example, which is the TLS library curl is typically built with on Redhat and Centos, handles the SSLKEYLOGFILE magic all by itself so by extension you have been able to do this trick with curl for a long time – as long as you use curl built with NSS. A pretty good argument to use that build really.

Since curl version 7.57.0 the SSLKEYLOGFILE feature can also be enabled when built with GnuTLS, BoringSSL or OpenSSL. In the latter two libs, the feature is powered by new APIs in those libraries and in GnuTLS the library’s own logic similar to how NSS does it. Since OpenSSL is the by far most popular TLS backend for curl, this feature is now brought to users more widely.

In curl 7.58.0 (due to ship on Janurary 24, 2018), this feature is built by default also for curl with OpenSSL and in 7.57.0 you need to define ENABLE_SSLKEYLOGFILE to enable it for OpenSSL and BoringSSL.

And what’s even cooler? This feature is at the same time also brought to every single application out there that is built against this or later versions of libcurl. In one single blow. now suddenly a whole world opens to make it easier for you to debug, diagnose and analyze your applications’ TLS traffic when powered by libcurl!

Like the description above for browsers, you

  1. set the environment variable SSLKEYLOGFILE to a file name to store the secrets in
  2. tell Wireshark to use that same file to find the TLS secrets (Preferences->Protocols->SSL), as the screenshot showed above
  3. run the libcurl-using application (such as curl) and Wireshark will be able to inspect TLS-based protocols just fine!

trace options

Of course, as a light weight alternative: you may opt to use the –trace or –trace-ascii options with the curl tool and be fully satisfied with that. Using those command line options, curl will log everything sent and received in the protocol layer without the TLS applied. With HTTPS you’ll see all the HTTP traffic for example.

Credits

Most of the curl work to enable this feature was done by Peter Wu and Ray Satiro.

cURL and libcurl, Network, Security

Say hi to curl 7.56.0

2 Comments

Another curl version has been released into the world. curl 7.56.0 is available for download from the usual place. Here are some news I think are worthy to mention this time…

An FTP security issue

A mistake in the code that parses responses to the PWD command could make curl read beyond the end of a buffer, Max Dymond figured it out, and we’ve released a security advisory about it. Our 69th security vulnerability counted from the beginning and the 8th reported in 2017.

Multiple SSL backends

Since basically forever you’ve been able to build curl with a selected SSL backend to make it get a different feature set or behave slightly different – or use a different license or get a different footprint. curl supports eleven different TLS libraries!

Starting now, libcurl can be built to support more than one SSL backend! You specify all the SSL backends at build-time and then you can tell libcurl at run-time exactly which of the backends it should use.

The selection can only happen once per invocation so there’s no switching back and forth among them, but still. It also of course requires that you actually build curl with more than one TLS library, which you do by telling configure all the libs to use.

The first user of this feature that I’m aware of is git for windows that can select between using the schannel and OpenSSL backends.

curl_global_sslset() is the new libcurl call to do this with.

This feature was brought by Johannes Schindelin.

New MIME API

The currently provided API for creating multipart formposts, curl_formadd, has always been considered a bit quirky and complicated to work with. Its extensive use of varargs is to blame for a significant part of that.

Now, we finally introduce a replacement API to accomplish basically the same features but also with a few additional ones, using a new API that is supposed to be easier to use and easier to wrap for bindings etc.

Introducing the mime API: curl_mime_init, curl_mime_addpart, curl_mime_name and more. See the postit2.c and multi-post.c examples for some easy to grasp examples.

This work was done by Patrick Monnerat.

SSH compression

The SSH protocol allows clients and servers to negotiate to use of compression when communicating, and now curl can too. curl has the new –compressed-ssh option and libcurl has a new setopt called CURLOPT_SSH_COMPRESSION using the familiar style.

Feature worked on by Viktor Szakats.

SSLKEYLOGFILE

Peter Wu and Jay Satiro have worked on this feature that allows curl to store SSL session secrets in a file if this environment variable is set. This is normally the way you tell Chrome and Firefox to do this, and is extremely helpful when you want to wireshark and analyze a TLS stream.

This is still disabled by default due to its early days. Enable it by defining ENABLE_SSLKEYLOGFILE when building libcurl and set environment variable SSLKEYLOGFILE to a pathname that will receive the keys.

Numbers

This, the 169th curl release, contains 89 bug fixes done during the 51 days since the previous release.

47 contributors helped making this release, out of whom 18 are new.

254 commits were done since the previous release, by 26 authors.

The top-5 commit authors this release are:

  1. Daniel Stenberg (116)
  2. Johannes Schindelin (37)
  3. Patrick Monnerat (28)
  4. Jay Satiro (12)
  5. Dan Fandrich (10)

Thanks a lot everyone!

(picture from pixabay)

cURL and libcurl, Mozilla, Network, Web

Http2 interim meeting NYC

5 Comments

On June 5th, around thirty people sat down around a huge table in a conference room on the 4th floor in the Google offices in New York City, with a heavy rain pouring down outside.

It was time for another IETF http2 interim meeting. The attendees were all participants in the HTTPbis work group and came from a wide variety of companies and countries. The major browser vendors were represented there, and so were operators and big service providers and some proxy people. Most of the people who have been speaking up on the mailing list over the last year or so, unfortunately with a couple of people notably absent. (And before anyone asks, yes we are a group where the majority is old males like me.)

Most people present knew many of the others already, which helped to create a friendly familiar spirit and we quickly got started on the Thursday morning working our way through the rather long lits of issues to deal with. When we had our previous interim meeting in London, I think most of us though we would’ve been further along today but recent development and discussions on the list had actually brought back a lot of issues we though we were already done with and we now reiterated a whole slew of subjects. We weren’t allowed to take photographs indoors so you won’t see any pictures of this opportunity from me here.

Google offices building logo

We did close many issues and I’ll just quickly mention some of the noteworthy ones here…

Extensions

We started out with the topic of “extensions”. Should we revert the decision from Zurich (where it was decided that we shouldn’t allow extensions in http2) or was the current state of the protocol the right one? The arguments for allowing extensions included that we’d keep getting requests for new things to add unless we have a way and that some of the recent stuff we’ve added really could’ve been done as extensions instead. An argument against it is that it makes things much simpler and reliable if we just document exactly what the protocol has and is, and removing “optional” behavior from the protocol has been one of the primary mantas along the design process.

The discussion went back and forth for a long time, and after almost three hours we had kind of a draw. Nobody was firmly against “the other” alternative but the two sides also seemed to have roughly the same amount of support. Then it was yet again time for the coin toss to guide us. Martin brought out an Australian coin and … the next protocol draft will allow extensions. Again. This also forces implementation to have to read and skip all unknown frames it receives compared to the existing situation where no unknown frames can ever occur.

BLOCKED as an extension

A rather given first candidate for an extension was the BLOCKED frame. At the time BLOCKED was added to the protocol it was explicitly added into the spec because we didn’t have extensions – and it is now being lifted out into one.

ALTSVC as an extension

What received slightly more resistance was the move to move out the ALTSVC frame as well. It was argued that the frame isn’t mandatory to support and therefore easily can be made into an extension.

Simplified padding

Another small change of the wire format since draft-12 was the removal of the high byte for padding to simplify. It reduces the amount you can pad a single frame but you can easily pad more using other means if you really have to, and there were numbers presented that said that 255 bytes were enough with HTTP 1.1 already so probably it will be enough for version 2 as well.

Schedule

There will be a new draft out really soon: draft -13. Martin, our editor of the spec, says he’ll be able to ship it in a week. That is intended to be the last draft, intended for implementation and it will then be expected to get deployed rather widely to allow us all in the industry to see how it works and be able to polish details or wordings that may still need it.

We had numerous vendors and HTTP stack implementers in the room and when we discussed schedule for when various products will be able to see daylight. If we all manage to stick to the plans. we may just have plenty of products and services that support http2 by the September/October time frame. If nothing major is found in this latest draft, we’re looking at RFC status not too far into 2015.

Meeting summary

I think we’re closing in for real now and I have good hopes for the protocol and our progress to a really wide scale deployment across the Internet. The HTTPbis group is an awesome crowd to work with and I had a great time. Our hosts took good care of us and made sure we didn’t lack any services or supplies. Extra thanks go to those of you who bought me dinners and to those who took me out to good beer places!

My http2 document

Yeah, it will now become somewhat out of date and my plan is to update it once the next draft ships. I’ll also do another http2 presentation already this week so I hope to also post an updated slide set soonish. Stay tuned!

Wireshark

My plan is to cooperate with the other Wireshark hackers and help making sure we have the next draft version supported in Wireshark really soon after its published.

curl and nghttp2

Most of the differences introduced are in the binary format so nghttp2 will need to be updated again – it is the library curl uses for the wire format of http2. The curl parts will need some adjustments, for example for Content-Encoding gzip that no longer is implicit but there should be little to do in the curl code for this draft bump.

Open Source

Wireshark dissector work

WiresharkRecently I cloned the Wireshark git repository and started updating the http2 dissector. That’s the piece of code that gets called to analyze a stream of data that Wireshark thinks is http2.

The current http2 dissector was left at draft-09 state, while the current draft at the time was number 11 and there have been several changes on the binary format since so any reasonably updated client or server would send or receive byte streams that Wireshark couldn’t properly display.

I never wrote any dissector code before but I must say Wireshark didn’t disappoint. It was straight forward and mostly downright easy to fix most of the wrong details. I’m not pretending to be a master at this nor is the dissector code anywhere near “finished” yet but I still enjoyed the API and how to write a thing like this.

I’ve since dissected plain-text http2 streams that I’ve done with curl+nghttp2 and I’ve also used the SSLKEYLOGFILE trick with Firefox to automatically decrypt the TLS session and have the dissector figure out the underlying http2 parts.

If there’s any little snag to mention, it is the fact that they insist on getting patches submitted directly to gerrit instead of any mailing list or similar. This required me to create a gerrit account, and really figure out how to push my stuff from git to there, instead of the more traditional and simpler approach of just sending my patch to a mailing list or possibly submitting it to a bug/patch tracker somewhere with my browser.

Call me old-style but in fact the hip way of today with a pull-request github style would also have been much easier. Here’s what my gerrit submission looks like. But I get it, gerrit does push a little more work over to the submitter and I figure that once a submitter such as myself finally has fixed all the nits in the patch it is very easy for the project to actually merge it. I actually got someone else to help me point out how to even find the link to view the code review after the first one was submitted on the site… (when I post this, my patch has not yet been accepted or merged into the wireshark git repo)

Here’s a basic screenshot showing a trace of Firefox requesting https://nghttp2.org using http2. Click it for the full thing.

wireshark-screenshot

.. and what happens this morning my time? There’s a brand new http2 draft-12 out with more changes on the on-the-wire format! Well to be honest, that really wasn’t a surprise. I’ll get the new stuff supported too, but I’ll do that in a separate patch as I prefer to hold off until I see a live stream by at least one implementation to test against.