Re: [Bridge] [PATCH v8 net-next 10/12] net: dsa: mv88e6xxx: mac-auth/MAB implementation

[netdev@kapio-technology.com]

On 2022-10-22 15:49, Ido Schimmel wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 09:14:11PM +0300, Vladimir Oltean wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 07:39:34PM +0200, netdev@kapio-technology.com 
>> wrote:
>> > Well, with this change, to have MAB working, the bridge would need learning on
>> > of course, but how things work with the bridge according to the flags, they
>> > should also work in the offloaded case if you ask me. There should be no
>> > difference between the two, thus MAB in drivers would have to be with
>> > learning on.
>> 
>> Am I proposing for things to work differently in the offload and
>> software case, and not realizing it? :-/
>> 
>> The essence of my proposal was to send a bug fix now which denies
>> BR_LEARNING to be set together with BR_PORT_LOCKED. The fact that
>> link-local traffic is learned by the software bridge is something
>> unintended as far as I understand.
>> 
>> You tried to fix it here, and as far as I could search in my inbox, 
>> that
>> didn't go anywhere:
>> https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/47d8d747-54ef-df52-3b9c-acb9a77fa14a@blackwall.org/T/#u
>> 
>> I thought only mv88e6xxx offloads BR_PORT_LOCKED, but now, after
>> searching, I also see prestera has support for it, so let me add
>> Oleksandr Mazur to the discussion as well. I wonder how they deal with
>> this? Has somebody come to rely on learning being enabled on a locked
>> port?
>> 
>> 
>> MAB in offloading drivers will have to be with learning on (same as in
>> software). When BR_PORT_LOCKED | BR_LEARNING will be allowed together
>> back in net-next (to denote the MAB configuration), offloading drivers
>> (mv88e6xxx and prestera) will be patched to reject them. They will 
>> only
>> accept the two together when they implement MAB support.
>> 
>> Future drivers after this mess has been cleaned up will have to look 
>> at
>> the BR_PORT_LOCKED and BR_LEARNING flag in combination, to see which
>> kind of learning is desired on a port (secure, CPU based learning or
>> autonomous learning).
>> 
>> Am I not making sense?
> 
> I will try to summarize what I learned from past discussions because I
> think it is not properly explained in the commit messages.
> 
> If you look at the hostapd fork by Westermo [1], you will see that they
> are authorizing hosts by adding dynamic FDB entries from user space, 
> not

Those dynamic FDB entries are to be dynamic ATU entries by a patch set 
that
I have ready, but which I have not submitted as I was expecting to 
submit
it after this patch set was accepted.

The important aspect of Dynamic ATU entries is that the HW refreshes the
ATU entries with an active host.


> static ones. Someone from Westermo will need to confirm this, but I

I represent WesterMo in the upstreaming of these patches, and can 
confirm
that both for hostapd and the MAB solution, WesterMo authorizes by using
dynamic entries.

> guess the reasons are that a) They want hosts that became silent to 
> lose
> their authentication after the aging time b) They want hosts to lose
> their authentication when the carrier of the bridge port goes down. 
> This
> will cause the bridge driver to flush dynamic FDB entries, but not
> static ones. Otherwise, an attacker with physical access to the switch
> and knowledge of the MAC address of the authenticated host can connect 
> a
> different (malicious) host that will be able to communicate through the
> bridge.

Seems correct, only that it must be specified that it must be the 
switchcore
and not the bridge that ages the entries, thus ATU entries.

> 
> In the above scenario, learning does not need to be on for the bridge 
> to
> populate its FDB, but rather for the bridge to refresh the dynamic FDB
> entries installed by hostapd. This seems like a valid use case and one
> needs a good reason to break it in future kernels.
> 
> Regarding learning from link-local frames, this can be mitigated by [2]
> without adding additional checks in the bridge. I don't know why this
> bridge option was originally added, but if it wasn't for this use case,
> then now it has another use case.
> 
> Regarding MAB, from the above you can see that a pure 802.1X
> implementation that does not involve MAB can benefit from locked bridge
> ports with learning enabled. It is therefore not accurate to say that
> one wants MAB merely by enabling learning on a locked port. Given that
> MAB is a proprietary extension and much less secure than 802.1X, we can
> assume that there will be deployments out there that do not use MAB and
> do not care about notifications regarding locked FDB entries. I
> therefore think that MAB needs to be enabled by a separate bridge port
> flag that is rejected unless the bridge port is locked and has learning
> enabled.
> 
> Regarding hardware offload, I have an idea (needs testing) on how to
> make mlxsw work in a similar way to mv88e6xxx. That is, does not 
> involve
> injecting frames that incurred a miss to the Rx path. If you guys want,
> I'm willing to take a subset of the patches here, improve the commit
> message, do some small changes and submit them along with an mlxsw
> implementation. My intention is not to discredit anyone (I will keep 
> the
> original authorship), but to help push this forward and give another
> example of hardware offload.

You are very welcome to help pushing this forward for my sake, I just 
need
to know how it will affect this patch set. :-)

> 
> [1] 
> https://github.com/westermo/hostapd/commit/10c584b875a63a9e58b0ad39835282545351c30e#diff-338b6fad34b4bdb015d7d96930974bd96796b754257473b6c91527789656d6ed
> [2] 
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/network/iproute2/iproute2-next.git/commit/?id=c74a8bc9cf5d6b6c9d8c64d5a80c5740165f315a