On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 05:12:06PM +0200, Michal Privoznik wrote:
On 05/24/2017 04:58 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 04:16:45PM +0200, Michal Privoznik wrote:On 05/24/2017 02:47 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 12:49:58PM +0200, Michal Privoznik wrote:That's quite exact. I mean the word 'guessing'. We can't really provide reliable way of dealing with what you're suggesting (unless we cut the limit really small) nor we can guarantee atomicity. Therefore I think it would be a waste of time to work on this. Yes, it can be done, but the benefits are pretty small IMO.Why is atomicity a problem?The atomicity steps in depending on what level we are talking about serialization. If we do it the way Martin suggested (= on public API level) then the list of domains may change between two iterations of the suggested loop. Thus the result obtained would not reflect the reality. However, if we are talking on RPC level, then there's no atomicity problem as RPC is 'blind' to the data (it doesn't care what data is sent).Just structure the libvirtd messages so that you have: COLLECT_THE_STATS - saves the stats into an internal buffer in libvirtd and returns a handle and a number of stat items RETURN_THE_STATS - returns partial subset of previously collected stats, called multiple times to transfer the data back to libvirt FREE_THE_STATS - free the internal bufferThis is exactly what I was proposing in my e-mail that I linked in the other thread. You just wrote it more cute. Yet again, what's the gain/advantage of this over one big message?In the libguestfs case there is an actual security concern. The daemon runs in the untrusted context of the guest, where a malicious guest filesystem or program could (in some cases quite easily) send back arbitrarily large messages to the library, tieing up infinite resources on the host. In libvirt the danger is possibly more on the other side (modified library sends infinitely large message to libvirtd). There's also an issue of libvirt connecting to a compromised remote host. Whether having a maximum message size prevents all such attacks I'm less clear about, but it probably helps against simple ones.I'm not a security expert but I view both approach the same from security POV. I mean, I'm all up for limits. Don't get me wrong there. It's just that we have two options: a) one API call = one RPC call b) one API call split across multiple RPC messages So, it's obvious that in case a) we need bigger limit for the RPC message to fit all the data. In case b) the limit for the RPC message can be smaller, but in turn we need limit for the maximum messages per one API call. Both of these approaches consume about the same memory on src & dst (I think option b) does consume slightly more because of all the extra headers sent with each message, but that's not the point). Now, if I were an attacker I can very well send one big message as well as N small messages to fill up the buffers. Therefore I think the attack surface is the same for both of these approaches. a) is easier to implement IMO.
You are forgetting one thing. If b) is only utilized on the way from the daemon to the client, then you can keep the number of messages per RPC call unlimited without any security concern. The only thing that would have to get compromised is the daemon and if that happens, there are bigger issues than DoS'ing the client. It would actually solve all of our current issues (not talking about client starting a domain with 10,000 disks, of course). Martin
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
-- libvir-list mailing list libvir-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvir-list
