The babel protocol normally sends all its messages as multicast packets,
but the protocol specification allows most messages to be sent as either
unicast or multicast, and the two can be mixed freely. In particular, the
babeld implementation can be configured to unicast updates to all peers
instead of sending them as unicast.
Daniel discovered that this can cause problems with the packet counter
checks in the MAC extension due to packet reordering. This happens on WiFi
networks where clients have power save enabled (which is quite common in
infrastructure networks): in this case, the access point will buffer all
multicast traffic and only send it out along with its beacons, leading to a
maximum buffering in default Linux-based access point configuration of up
to 200 ms.
This means that a Babel sender that mixes unicast and multicast messages
can have the unicast messages overtake the multicast messages because of
this buffering; when authentication is enabled, this causes the receiver to
discard the multicast message when it does arrive because it now has a
packet counter value less than the unicast message that arrived before it.
Daniel observed that this happens frequently enough that Babel ceases to
work entirely when runner over a WiFi network.
The issue has been described in draft-ietf-babel-mac-relaxed, which is
currently pending RFC publication. That also describes two mitigation
mechanisms: Keeping separate PC counters for unicast and multicast, and
using a reorder window for PC values. This patch implements the former as
that is the simplest, and resolves the particular issue seen on WiFi.
Thanks to Daniel Gröber for the bugreport.
Minor changes from committer.
The patch implements an IPv4 via IPv6 extension (RFC 9229) to the Babel
routing protocol (RFC 8966) that allows annoncing routes to an IPv4
prefix with an IPv6 next hop, which makes it possible for IPv4 traffic
to flow through interfaces that have not been assigned an IPv4 address.
The implementation is compatible with the current Babeld version.
Thanks to Toke Høiland-Jørgensen for early review on this work.
Minor changes from committer.
When creating a new babel_source object we initialise the seqno to 0. The
caller will update the source object with the right metric and seqno value,
for both newly created and old source objects. However if we initialise the
source object seqno to 0 that may actually turn out to be a valid (higher)
seqno than the one in the routing table, because of seqno wrapping. In this
case the source metric will not be set properly, which breaks feasibility
tracking for subsequent updates.
To fix this, add a new initial_seqno argument to babel_get_source() which
is used when allocating a new object, and set that to the seqno value of
the update we're sending.
Thanks to Juliusz Chroboczek for the bugreport.
Juliusz noticed there were a couple of places we were doing straight
inequality comparisons of seqnos in Babel. This is wrong because seqnos can
wrap: so we need to use the modulo-64k comparison function for these cases
as well.
Introduce a strict-inequality version of the modulo-comparison for this
purpose.
Protocols receive if_notify() announcements that are filtered according
to their VRF setting, but during reconfiguration, they access iface_list
directly and forgot to check VRF setting here, which leads to all
interfaces be addedd.
Fix this issue for Babel, OSPF, RAdv and RIP protocols.
Thanks to Marcel Menzel for the bugreport.
During backporting attribute changes from 3.0-branch, some internal
attributes (RIP iface and Babel seqno) leaked to 'show route all' output.
Allow protocols to hide specific attributes with GA_HIDDEN value.
Thanks to Nigel Kukard for the bugreport.
There were some confusion about validity and usage of pflags, which
caused incorrect usage after some flags from (now removed) protocol-
specific area were moved to pflags.
We state that pflags:
- Are secondary data used by protocol-specific hooks
- Can be changed on an existing route (in contrast to copy-on-write
for primary data)
- Are irrelevant for propagation (not propagated when changed)
- Are specific to a routing table (not propagated by pipe)
The patch did these fixes:
- Do not compare pflags in rte_same(), as they may keep cached values
like BGP_REF_STALE, causing spurious propagation.
- Initialize pflags to zero in rte_get_temp(), avoid initialization in
protocol code, fixing at least two forgotten initializations (krt
and one case in babel).
- Improve documentation about pflags
The seqno request retransmission handling was tracking the destination
that a forwarded request was being sent to and always retransmitting to
that same destination. This is unnecessary because we only need to
retransmit requests we originate ourselves, not those we forward on
behalf of others; in fact retransmitting on behalf of others can lead to
exponential multiplication of requests, which would be bad.
So rework the seqno request tracking so that instead of storing the
destination of a request, we just track whether it was a request that we
forwarded on behalf of another node, or if it was a request we originated
ourselves. Forwarded requests are not retransmitted, they are only used
for duplicate suppression, and for triggering an update when satisfied.
If we end up originating a request that we previously forwarded, we
"upgrade" the old request and restart the retransmit counter.
One complication with this is that requests sent in response to unfeasible
updates (section 3.8.2.2 of the RFC) have to be sent as unicast to a
particular peer. However, we don't really need to retransmit those as
there's no starvation when sending such a request; so we just change
such requests to be one-off unicast requests that are not subject to
retransmission or duplicate suppression. This is the same behaviour as
babeld has for such requests.
Minor changes from committer.
Passing protocol to preexport was in fact a historical relic from the
old times when channels weren't a thing. Refactoring that to match
current extensibility needs.
The Babel seqno request code keeps track of which seqno requests are
outstanding for a neighbour by putting them onto a per-neighbour list. When
reusing a seqno request, it will try to remove this node, but if the seqno
request in question was a multicast request with no neighbour attached this
will result in a crash because it tries to remove a list node that wasn't
added to any list.
Fix this by making the list remove conditional. Also fix neighbor removal
which were changing seqno requests to multicast ones instead of removing
them.
Fixes: ebd5751cde ("Babel: Seqno requests are properly decoupled from
neighbors when the underlying interface disappears").
Based on the patch from Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@toke.dk>,
bug reported by Stefan Haller <stefan.haller@stha.de>, thanks.
When shutting down a Babel instance we send a wildcard retraction to make
sure all peers can quickly switch to other route origins. Add another small
optimisation borrowed from babeld: sending a Hello message (along with the
retraction) with a very low interval.
This will cause neighbours to modify their expiry timers for the node's
state to quickly time it out, thus conserving resources in the network.
A recent change in Babel causes ifaces to disappear after
reconfiguration. The patch fixes that.
Thanks to Johannes Kimmel for an insightful bugreport.
Attach a prefix trie to IP/VPN/ROA tables. Use it for net_route() and
net_roa_check(). This leads to 3-5x speedups for IPv4 and 5-10x
speedup for IPv6 of these calls.
TODO:
- Rebuild the trie during rt_prune_table()
- Better way to avoid trie_add_prefix() in net_get() for existing tables
- Make it configurable (?)
Some cleanups and bugfixes to the previous patch, including:
- Fix rate limiting in index mismatch check
- Fix missing BABEL_AUTH_INDEX_LEN in auth_tx_overhead computation
- Fix missing auth_tx_overhead recalculation during reconfiguration
- Fix pseudoheader construction in babel_auth_sign() (sport vs fport)
- Fix typecasts for ptrdiffs in log messages
- Make auth log messages similar to corresponding RIP/OSPF ones
- Change auth log messages for events that happen during regular
operation to debug messages
- Switch meaning of babel_auth_check*() functions for consistency
with corresponding RIP/OSPF ones
- Remove requirement for min/max key length, only those required by
given MAC code are enforced
This implements support for MAC authentication in the Babel protocol, as
specified by RFC 8967. The implementation seeks to follow the RFC as close
as possible, with the only deliberate deviation being the addition of
support for all the HMAC algorithms already supported by Bird, as well as
the Blake2b variant of the Blake algorithm.
For description of applicability, assumptions and security properties,
see RFC 8967 sections 1.1 and 1.2.
In preparation for adding authentication checks, refactor the TLV
walking code so it can be reused for a separate pass of the packet
for authentication checks.
When an interface disappears, all the neighbors are freed as well. Seqno
requests were anyway not decoupled from them, leading to strange
segfaults. This fix adds a proper seqno request list inside neighbors to
make sure that no pointer to neighbor is kept after free.
The babel protocol code checks whether iface supports multicast, and
whether it has a link-local address assigned. However, it doesn not give
any feedback if any of those checks fail, it just silently ignores the
interface. Fix this by explicitly logging when multicast check fails.
Based on patch from Toke Høiland-Jørgensen, thanks!
The babel protocol code was initialising objects returned from the slab
allocator by assigning to each of the struct members individually, but
wasn't touching the NODE member while doing so. This leads to warnings on
debug builds since commit:
baac700906 ("List expensive check.")
To fix this, introduce an sl_allocz() variant of the slab allocator which
will zero out the memory before returning it, and switch all the babel call
sites to use this version. The overhead for doing this should be negligible
for small objects, and in the case of babel, the largest object being
allocated was being zeroed anyway, so we can drop the memset in
babel_read_tlv().
Most commands like 'show ospf neighbors' fail when protocol is not
specified and there are multiple instances of given protocol type.
This is annoying in BIRD 2, as many protocols have IPv4 and IPv6
instances. The patch changes that by showing output from all protocol
instances of appropriate type.
Note that the patch also removes terminating cli_msg() call from these
commands and moves it to the common iterating code.
If the next hop of a route is not a reachable address, the route should be
installed as onlink. This enables a configuration common in mesh networks
where the mesh interface is assigned a /32 and babel handles the routing by
installing onlink routes.
Thanks to Toke Hoiland-Jorgensen for the patch.
The temporary atttributes are no longer removed by ea_do_prune(), but
they are undefined by store_tmp_attrs() protocol hooks. This fixes
several bugs where temporary attributes were removed when they should
not or not removed when they should be. The flag EAF_TEMP is no longer
needed and was removed.
Update all protocol make_tmp_attrs() / store_tmp_attrs() hooks to use
helper functions and to handle unset attributes properly.
Also fix some related bugs like improper handling of empty eattr list.
This is a major change of how the filters are interpreted. If everything
works how it should, it should not affect you unless you are hacking the
filters themselves.
Anyway, this change should make a huge improvement in the filter performance
as previous benchmarks showed that our major problem lies in the
recursion itself.
There are also some changes in nest and protocols, related mostly to
spreading const declarations throughout the whole BIRD and also to
refactored dynamic attribute definitions. The need of these came up
during the whole work and it is too difficult to split out these
not-so-related changes.
Once upon a time, far far away, there were the old Bird developers
discussing what direction of route flow shall be called import and
export. They decided to say "import to protocol" and "export to table"
when speaking about a protocol. When speaking about a table, they
spoke about "importing to table" and "exporting to protocol".
The latter terminology was adopted in configuration, then also the
bird CLI in commit ea2ae6dd0 started to use it (in year 2009). Now
it's 2018 and the terminology is the latter. Import is from protocol to
table, export is from table to protocol. Anyway, there was still an
import_control hook which executed right before route export.
One thing is funny. There are two commits in April 1999 with just two
minutes between them. The older announces the final settlement
on config terminology, the newer uses the other definition. Let's see
their commit messages as the git-log tool shows them (the newer first):
commit 9e0e485e50
Author: Martin Mares <mj@ucw.cz>
Date: Mon Apr 5 20:17:59 1999 +0000
Added some new protocol hooks (look at the comments for better explanation):
make_tmp_attrs Convert inline attributes to ea_list
store_tmp_attrs Convert ea_list to inline attributes
import_control Pre-import decisions
commit 5056c559c4
Author: Martin Mares <mj@ucw.cz>
Date: Mon Apr 5 20:15:31 1999 +0000
Changed syntax of attaching filters to protocols to hopefully the final
version:
EXPORT <filter-spec> for outbound routes (i.e., those announced
by BIRD to the rest of the world).
IMPORT <filter-spec> for inbound routes (i.e., those imported
by BIRD from the rest of the world).
where <filter-spec> is one of:
ALL pass all routes
NONE drop all routes
FILTER <name> use named filter
FILTER { <filter> } use explicitly defined filter
For all protocols, the default is IMPORT ALL, EXPORT NONE. This includes
the kernel protocol, so that you need to add EXPORT ALL to get the previous
configuration of kernel syncer (as usually, see doc/bird.conf.example for
a bird.conf example :)).
Let's say RIP to this almost 19-years-old inconsistency. For now, if you
import a route, it is always from protocol to table. If you export a
route, it is always from table to protocol.
And they lived happily ever after.
Modify protocols to use preferred address change notification instead on
depending on hard-reset of interfaces in that case, and remove hard-reset
in that case. This avoids issue when e.g. IPv6 protocol restarts
interface when IPv4 preferred address changed (as hard-reset is
unavoidable and common for whole iface).
The patch also fixes a bug when removing last address does not send
preferred address change notification.
