On Tue, Mar 01, 2022 at 07:37:06PM +0100, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote: > Hi Michael, > > On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 6:17 PM Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hmm okay, so it's a performance optimization... some batching then? Do > > you really need to worry about every packet? Every 64 packets not > > enough? Packets are after all queued at NICs etc, and VM fork can > > happen after they leave wireguard ... > > Unfortunately, yes, this is an "every packet" sort of thing -- if the > race is to be avoided in a meaningful way. It's really extra bad: > ChaCha20 and AES-CTR work by xoring a secret stream of bytes with > plaintext to produce a ciphertext. If you use that same secret stream > and xor it with a second plaintext and transmit that too, an attacker > can combine the two different ciphertexts to learn things about the > original plaintext. So what about the point about packets queued then? You don't fish packets out of qdisc queues, do you? > But, anyway, it seems like the race is here to stay given what we have > _currently_ available with the virtual hardware. That's why I'm > focused on trying to get something going that's the least bad with > what we've currently got, which is racy by design. How vitally > important is it to have something that doesn't race in the far future? > I don't know, really. It seems plausible that that ACPI notifier > triggers so early that nothing else really even has a chance, so the > race concern is purely theoretical. But I haven't tried to measure > that so I'm not sure. > > Jason
