We strongly suspect that bug 40897 was caused by a custom Tor client that
tried to use more than the default number of conflux circuits, for either
performance or traffic analysis defense gains, or both.
This entity hit a safety check on the exit side, which caused a UAF. Our
"belt and suspenders" snapped off, and hit us in the face... again...
Since there are good reasons to try more than 2 conflux legs, and research has
found some traffic analysis benefits with as many as 5, we're going to raise
and parameterize this limit as a form of bug bounty for finding this UAF, so
that this entity can try out a little more confluxing.
This should also make it easier for researchers to try things like gathering
traces with larger amounts of confluxing than normal, to measure real-world
traffic analysis impacts of conflux.
Shine on, you yoloing anonymous diamond. Let us know if you find out anything
interesting!
This exemption used to be helpful in keeping exit relays from tripping
the DoS detection subsystem and losing Tor connectivity. Now exit relays
block re-entry into the network (tor issue #2667) so it's no longer
needed. We'd like to re-enable protection on these addresses to avoid
giving attackers a way around our DoS mitigations.
tor only marks a channel as 'open' once the TLS and OR handshakes have both
completed, and normal "client" (ORPort) DoS protection is not enabled until
the channel becomes open. This patch adds an additional earlier initialization
path for DoS protection on incoming TLS connections.
This leaves the existing dos_new_client_conn() call sites intact, but adds a
guard against multiple-initialization using the existing
tracked_for_dos_mitigation flag. Other types of channels shouldn't be affected
by this patch.
This started as a response to ticket #40792 where Coverity is
complaining about a potential year 2038 bug where we cast time_t from
approx_time() to uint32_t for use in token_bucket_ctr.
There was a larger can of worms though, since token_bucket really
doesn't want to be using wallclock time here. I audited the call sites
for approx_time() and changed any that used a 32-bit cast or made
inappropriate use of wallclock time. Things like certificate lifetime,
consensus intervals, etc. need wallclock time. Measurements of rates
over time, however, are better served with a monotonic timer that does
not try and sync with wallclock ever.
Looking closer at token_bucket, its design is a bit odd because it was
initially intended for use with tick units but later forked into
token_bucket_rw which uses ticks to count bytes per second, and
token_bucket_ctr which uses seconds to count slower events. The rates
represented by either token bucket can't be lower than 1 per second, so
the slower timer in 'ctr' is necessary to represent the slower rates of
things like connections or introduction packets or rendezvous attempts.
I considered modifying token_bucket to use 64-bit timestamps overall
instead of 32-bit, but that seemed like an unnecessarily invasive change
that would grant some peace of mind but probably not help much. I was
more interested in removing the dependency on wallclock time. The
token_bucket_rw timer already uses monotonic time. This patch converts
token_bucket_ctr to use monotonic time as well. It introduces a new
monotime_coarse_absolute_sec(), which is currently the same as nsec
divided by a billion but could be optimized easily if we ever need to.
This patch also might fix a rollover bug.. I haven't tested this
extensively but I don't think the previous version of the rollover code
on either token bucket was correct, and I would expect it to get stuck
after the first rollover.
Signed-off-by: Micah Elizabeth Scott <beth@torproject.org>
David Goulet
Alexander Færøy
Mike Perry
trinity-1686a
Micah Elizabeth Scott
Roger Dingledine