Re: [PATCH 5/5] tcp/md5: Make more generic tcp_sig_pool

Leonard Crestez
2021-11-05T09:54:08Z

On 11/5/21 3:49 AM, Dmitry Safonov wrote:
> Convert tcp_md5sig_pool to more generic tcp_sig_pool.
> Now tcp_sig_pool_alloc(const char *alg) can be used to allocate per-cpu
> ahash request for different hashing algorithms besides md5.
> tcp_sig_pool_get() and tcp_sig_pool_put() should be used to get
> ahash_request and scratch area.

This pool pattern is a workaround for crypto-api only being able to
allocate transforms from user context.

It would be useful for this "one-transform-per-cpu" object to be part of
crypto api itself, there is nothing TCP-specific here other than the
size of scratch buffer.

> Make tcp_sig_pool reusable for TCP Authentication Option support
> (TCP-AO, RFC5925), where RFC5926[1] requires HMAC-SHA1 and AES-128_CMAC
> hashing at least.
Additional work would be required to support options of arbitrary size
and I don't think anyone would use non-standard crypto algorithms.

Is RFC5926 conformance really insufficient?

My knowledge of cryptography doesn't go much beyond "data goes in
signature goes out" but there are many recent arguments from that cipher
agility is outright harmful and recent protocols like WireGuard don't
support any algorithm choices.

> +#define TCP_SIG_POOL_MAX 8
> +static struct tcp_sig_pool_priv_t {
> + struct tcp_sig_crypto cryptos[TCP_SIG_POOL_MAX];
> + unsigned int cryptos_nr;
> +} tcp_sig_pool_priv = {
> + .cryptos_nr = 1,
> + .cryptos[TCP_MD5_SIG_ID].alg = "md5",
> +};

Why an array of 8? Better to use an arbitrary list.

--
Regards,
Leonard