Re: [RFC] tpm2-space: add handling for global session exhaustion

[Ken Goldman <kgoldman@us.ibm.com>]

On 1/27/2017 5:04 PM, James Bottomley wrote:

>> Beware the nasty corner case:
>>
>> - Application asks for a session and gets 02000000
>>
>> - Time elapses and 02000000 gets forcibly flushed
>>
>> - Later, app comes back, asks for a second session and again gets
>> 02000000.
>>
>> - App gets very confused.
>>
>> May it be better to close the connection completely, which the
>> application can detect, than flush a session and give this corner
>> case?
>
> if I look at the code I've written, I don't know what the session
> number is, I just save sessionHandle in a variable for later use (lets
> say to v1).  If I got the same session number returned at a later time
> and placed it in v2, all I'd notice is that an authorization using v1
> would fail.  I'm not averse to killing the entire connection but,
> assuming you have fallback, it might be kinder simply to ensure that
> the operations with the reclaimed session fail (which is what the code
> currently does).

My worry is that this session failure cannot be detected by the 
application.  An HMAC failure could cause the app to tell a user that 
they entered the wrong password.  Misleading.  On the TPM, it could 
trigger the dictionary attack lockout.  For a PIN index, it could 
consume a failure count.  Killing a policy session that has e.g., a 
policy signed term could cause the application to go back to some 
external entity for another authorization signature.

Let's go up to the stack.  What's the attack?

If we're worried about many simultaneous applications (wouldn't that be 
wonderful), why not just let startauthsession fail?  The application can 
just retry periodically.  Just allocate them in triples so there's no 
deadlock.

If we're worried about a DoS attack, killing a session just helps the 
attacker.  The attacker can create a few connections and spin on 
startauthsession, locking everyone out anyway.

~~

Also, let's remember that this is a rare application.  Sessions are only 
needed for remote access (requiring encryption, HMAC or salt), or policy 
sessions.

~~

Should the code also reserve a session for the kernel?  Mark it not 
kill'able?