Using OpenSSL without threads - windows

Whenever I bash into OpenSSL on Windows or Mac I always make my own memory BIOs, and link them up to the platforms message based (asynchronous non blocking) socket implementation. (WSAAsyncSelect on windows: CFSocket on Mac)
Secure programming with the OpenSSL API hosted on ibm.com seems to be the best reference on implementing OpenSSL - but it implements a very simple blocking connection.
Is there a standard way to setup and use OpenSSL with non blocking sockets - such that calls to SSL_read will not block if there is no data for example?

SSL_read() (and the other SSL functions) work fine if the underlying socket is set non-blocking. If insufficient data is available, it will return a value less than zero; SSL_get_error() called on the return value will return SSL_ERROR_WANT_READ or SSL_ERROR_WANT_WRITE, indicating what SSL is waiting for.

Using BIO_set_nbio with either BIO_new_socket or BIO_new_connect/accept is probably less code than creating memory BIOs. Not sure if there's anything more standard than that. The docs explain this in more detail:
http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/BIO_s_connect.html

Related

How is FastCGI implemented under Windows?

The official FastCGI documentation says that stdin is repurposed as a listening socket when a FastCGI module is started. That's great on Linux, where stdin and sockets are all ints, but I don't think it could it work on Windows, where stdin is a FILE*, and a socket is a HANDLE.
Since Windows servers do support FastCGI, someone has either found a way to make them compatible, or redefined the system for that OS. My Google-fu doesn't seem to be up to locating how though. Where can I find documentation on it?
FastCGI defines only the message exchange protocol, but people behind FastCGI also provide one implementation of that protocol for C++. In this implementation your app must use provided FCGX_Request object to rewire three provided FCGX_Stream objects to the usual ones (cin, cout, cerr). But I suspect that you don't have to rewire the streams, and can use them directly. Check out this FastCGI Hello World to see how it's done.
So, your app does not see HANDLE or FILE*. It sees instead fcgi_streambuf, which inherits from std::streambuf. The way the previously mentioned protocol is implemented is just a detail that you're not supposed to be concerned with. The implementation gets hold of a stream of bytes and provides it to the app, and also the other way around.

Windows Select API on OpenSSL

I have a requirement, where my server(Windows C++ using OpenSSL) will listen to 'n' number of clients and responds asynchronously based on the client request. For this, I am planning to use the SELECT API call. But it seems that OpenSSL doesn't work with the SELECT API call. So just wondering whether any other method is there, through which I can achieve this functionality.
Any help on this is very much appreciated.
OpenSSL works with select(), but the trick is knowing WHEN to use select(). For instance, traditional non-blocking socket logic when reading data is to call select() first and then call recv() when select() says there is data to read. That does NOT work with the tradtional OpenSSL API! You need to call ssl_read() first and then call select() to wait for readibility only when ssl_read() reports an SSL_ERROR_WANT_READ error. In other words, it is the difference between wait-for-ready-then-act vs act-then-wait-for-ready, respectively. And there is the possibility that ssl_read() can report a SSL_ERROR_WANT_WRITE error, in which case you have to call select() to check for writability instead. Yes, a read action can trigger a write action!
Similar consideration is needed for ssl_send() and SSL_ERROR_WANT_WRITE for writing, and SSL_ERROR_WANT_READ for reading. Yes, a write action can trigger a read action!
You really cannot graft tradtional OpenSSL on top of an existing non-SSL socket implementation, at least not without extra work. It can be done (I've done it), but it is not easy. Tradtional OpenSSL has its own logistics that are almost backwards then traditional socket logic.
If you have an existing socket implementation and just want to add SSL/TLS to it without big headaches, you have two choices:
Use OpenSSL's BIO API instead. Create two memory BIO pairs, one for input, and one for output.
Switch to Microsoft's Crypto/SChannel API (or another third party library that supports push models).
Either approach allows you to use your own socket I/O. When receiving encrypted data, read the socket data however you want and push it into the crypto engine, and when it spits out decrypted data then process as needed. When sending unencrypted data, push it into the crypto engine, and when it spits out encrypted data then send it to the socket however you want. This leaves you in full control of the socket. Using the traditional OpenSSL API, OpenSSL takes over control of the socket.

Best way to communicate from KEXT to Daemon and block until result is returned from Daemon

In KEXT, I am listening for file close via vnode or file scope listener. For certain (very few) files, I need to send file path to my system daemon which does some processing (this has to happen in daemon) and returns the result back to KEXT. The file close call needs to be blocked until I get response from daemon. Based on result I need to some operation in close call and return close call successfully. There is lot of discussion on KEXT communication related topic on the forum. But they are not conclusive and appears be very old (year 2002 around). This requirement can be handled by FtlSendMessage(...) Win32 API. I am looking for equivalent of that on Mac
Here is what I have looked at and want to summarize my understanding:
Mach message: Provides very good way of bidirectional communication using sender and reply ports with queueing mechansim. However, the mach message APIs (e.g. mach_msg, mach_port_allocate, bootstrap_look_up) don't appear to be KPIs. The mach API mach_msg_send_from_kernel can be used, but that alone will not help in bidirectional communication. Is my understanding right?
IOUserClient: This appears be more to do with communicating from User space to KEXT and then having some callbacks from KEXT. I did not find a way to initiate communication from KEXT to daemon and then wait for result from daemon. Am I missing something?
Sockets: This could be last option since I would have to implement entire bidirectional communication channel from KEXT to Daemon.
ioctl/sysctl: I don't know much about them. From what I have read, its not recommended option especially for bidirectional communication
RPC-Mig: Again I don't know much about them. Looks complicated from what I have seen. Not sure if this is recommended way.
KUNCUserNotification: This appears to be just providing notification to the user from KEXT. It does not meet my requirement.
Supported platform is (10.5 onwards). So looking at the requirement, can someone suggest and provide some pointers on this topic?
Thanks in advance.
The pattern I've used for that process is to have the user-space process initiate a socket connection to the KEXT; the KEXT creates a new thread to handle messages over that socket and sleeps the thread. When the KEXT detects an event it needs to respond to, it wakes the messaging thread and uses the existing socket to send data to the daemon. On receiving a response, control is passed back to the requesting thread to decide whether to veto the operation.
I don't know of any single resource that will describe that whole pattern completely, but the relevant KPIs are discussed in Mac OS X Internals (which seems old, but the KPIs haven't changed much since it was written) and OS X and iOS Kernel Programming (which I was a tech reviewer on).
For what it's worth, autofs uses what I assume you mean by "RPC-Mig", so it's not too complicated (MIG is used to describe the RPC calls, and the stub code it generates handles calling the appropriate Mach-message sending and receiving code; there are special options to generate kernel-mode stubs).
However, it doesn't need to do any lookups, as automountd (the user-mode daemon to which the autofs kext sends messages) has a "host special port" assigned to it. Doing the lookups to find an arbitrary service would be harder.
If you want to use the socket established with ctl_register() on the KExt side, then beware: The communication from kext to user space (via ctl_enqueuedata()) works OK. However opposite direction is buggy on 10.5.x and 10.6.x.
After about 70.000 or 80.000 send() calls with SOCK_DGRAM in the PF_SYSTEM domain complete net stack breaks with disastrous consequences for complete system (hard turning off is the only way out). This has been fixed in 10.7.0. I workaround by using setsockopt() in our project for the direction from user space to kext as we only send very small data (just to allow/disallow some operation).

Boost.Asio SSL ungraceful close

I am trying to handle SSL error scenarios where, for example, SSL async_handshake() is taking too long.
After some time (say 20sec) i want to close this connection (lowest_layer().close()).
I pass shared_ptr with connection object as a parameter to async_handshake(), so object still exists, eventually handshake handler is invoked and object gets destroyed.
But, still I'm getting sporadic crashes! Looks like after close() SSL is still trying to read or operate on read buffer.
So, the basic question - is it safe to hard close() SSL connection?
Any ideas?
Typically the method I've used stop outstanding asynchronous operations on a socket is socket::cancel as described in the documentation. Their handlers will be invoked with asio::error::operation_aborted as the error parameter, which you'll need to handle somehow.
That said, I don't see a problem using close instead of cancel. Though it is difficult to offer much help or advice without some code to analyze.
Note that some Windows platforms have problems when canceling outstanding asynchronous operations. The documentation has suggestions for portable cancelation if your application needs to support Windows.

Porting Winsock to Linux Sockets

I have a program that does some networking using Winsock, and one of our requirements right now is to port over our program to Linux. The only thing stopping us from doing this is Winsock.
My question is: How easy can I port this over to a Linux implementation?
Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of, and if I simply include the appropriate header files, what sort of things will I have to be sure to handle?
Thanks for any help!
I'd post code but I can't unfortunately due to legal reasons.
But, our code does use the following:
WSAStartup(..)
WSACleanup(..)
Socket(..)
sendto(..)
recvfrom(..)
ioctlsocket(..)
setsocketopt(..)
Based on that list of functions, things should more or less just work. Add #if _WIN32 around the calls to WSAStartup and WSACleanup (the linux equivalent is to not do anything, the sockets library is initialized automatically).
You also might need some OS-dependent code when setting socket options, some of them are the same, some aren't, and the types might be different.
It will depend if you use any windows specific networking functionality or if you're just using mostly the mostly BSD compatible API.
So, if you're using overlapped I/O and I/O completion ports and other advanced parts of the Winsock API then things will be very difficult to port and if you're just using the BSD compatible stuff then it should be easy to write a thin translation layer or even just have the winsock startup and shutdown stuff inside a windows specific ifdef...
This may help: http://tangentsoft.net/wskfaq/articles/bsd-compatibility.html
The only calls that make porting difficult are the WSA* calls.
WSAStartup() -> nop
WSACleanup() -> nop
Socket/setsockopt -> socket/setsockopt
Under *nix, sockets are blocking by default and it's not necessary or possible to use that weird setsockopt call to fiddle with it.
ioctlsocket -> ioctl
Under *nix we don't like asynchronous sockets much and prefer to use the select() system call.
---- Rest of this answer seems only to apply to Win95 compatible winsock ----
Unfortunately as the original socket() in Winsock was broken in some cases, you probably used WSASocket() and so have to convert those calls.
Without seeing code, it's tough to say how easy it is. But you should be able to replace winsock calls to analogs in sys/socket.h.

Resources