f5c7f5dfba
DTLS can handle out of order record delivery. Additionally since handshake messages can be bigger than will fit into a single packet, the messages can be fragmented across multiple records (as with normal TLS). That means that the messages can arrive mixed up, and we have to reassemble them. We keep a queue of buffered messages that are "from the future", i.e. messages we're not ready to deal with yet but have arrived early. The messages held there may not be full yet - they could be one or more fragments that are still in the process of being reassembled. The code assumes that we will eventually complete the reassembly and when that occurs the complete message is removed from the queue at the point that we need to use it. However, DTLS is also tolerant of packet loss. To get around that DTLS messages can be retransmitted. If we receive a full (non-fragmented) message from the peer after previously having received a fragment of that message, then we ignore the message in the queue and just use the non-fragmented version. At that point the queued message will never get removed. Additionally the peer could send "future" messages that we never get to in order to complete the handshake. Each message has a sequence number (starting from 0). We will accept a message fragment for the current message sequence number, or for any sequence up to 10 into the future. However if the Finished message has a sequence number of 2, anything greater than that in the queue is just left there. So, in those two ways we can end up with "orphaned" data in the queue that will never get removed - except when the connection is closed. At that point all the queues are flushed. An attacker could seek to exploit this by filling up the queues with lots of large messages that are never going to be used in order to attempt a DoS by memory exhaustion. I will assume that we are only concerned with servers here. It does not seem reasonable to be concerned about a memory exhaustion attack on a client. They are unlikely to process enough connections for this to be an issue. A "long" handshake with many messages might be 5 messages long (in the incoming direction), e.g. ClientHello, Certificate, ClientKeyExchange, CertificateVerify, Finished. So this would be message sequence numbers 0 to 4. Additionally we can buffer up to 10 messages in the future. Therefore the maximum number of messages that an attacker could send that could get orphaned would typically be 15. The maximum size that a DTLS message is allowed to be is defined by max_cert_list, which by default is 100k. Therefore the maximum amount of "orphaned" memory per connection is 1500k. Message sequence numbers get reset after the Finished message, so renegotiation will not extend the maximum number of messages that can be orphaned per connection. As noted above, the queues do get cleared when the connection is closed. Therefore in order to mount an effective attack, an attacker would have to open many simultaneous connections. Issue reported by Quan Luo. CVE-2016-2179 Reviewed-by: Richard Levitte <levitte@openssl.org> |
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|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| README | ||
| statem.c | ||
| statem.h | ||
| statem_clnt.c | ||
| statem_dtls.c | ||
| statem_lib.c | ||
| statem_locl.h | ||
| statem_srvr.c | ||
State Machine Design
====================
This file provides some guidance on the thinking behind the design of the
state machine code to aid future maintenance.
The state machine code replaces an older state machine present in OpenSSL
versions 1.0.2 and below. The new state machine has the following objectives:
- Remove duplication of state code between client and server
- Remove duplication of state code between TLS and DTLS
- Simplify transitions and bring the logic together in a single location
so that it is easier to validate
- Remove duplication of code between each of the message handling functions
- Receive a message first and then work out whether that is a valid
transition - not the other way around (the other way causes lots of issues
where we are expecting one type of message next but actually get something
else)
- Separate message flow state from handshake state (in order to better
understand each)
- message flow state = when to flush buffers; handling restarts in the
event of NBIO events; handling the common flow of steps for reading a
message and the common flow of steps for writing a message etc
- handshake state = what handshake message are we working on now
- Control complexity: only the state machine can change state: keep all
the state changes local to the state machine component
The message flow state machine is divided into a reading sub-state machine and a
writing sub-state machine. See the source comments in statem.c for a more
detailed description of the various states and transitions possible.
Conceptually the state machine component is designed as follows:
libssl
|
---------------------------|-----statem.h--------------------------------------
|
_______V____________________
| |
| statem.c |
| |
| Core state machine code |
|____________________________|
statem_locl.h ^ ^
_________| |_______
| |
_____________|____________ _____________|____________
| | | |
| statem_clnt.c | | statem_srvr.c |
| | | |
| TLS/DTLS client specific | | TLS/DTLS server specific |
| state machine code | | state machine code |
|__________________________| |__________________________|
| |_______________|__ |
| ________________| | |
| | | |
____________V_______V________ ________V______V_______________
| | | |
| statem_both.c | | statem_dtls.c |
| | | |
| Non core functions common | | Non core functions common to |
| to both servers and clients | | both DTLS servers and clients |
|_____________________________| |_______________________________|