Refactor into a class the logic of asking each server in turn until one of them gives an answer
that validates. It is called ValidatedThingObtainer.
Refactor the downloading and verification of the URI Extension Block into a class named
ValidatedExtendedURIProxy.
The new logic of validating UEBs is minimalist: it doesn't require the UEB to contain any
unncessary information, but of course it still accepts such information for backwards
compatibility (so that this new download code is able to download files uploaded with old, and
for that matter with current, upload code).
The new logic of validating UEBs follows the practice of doing all validation up front. This
practice advises one to isolate the validation of incoming data into one place, so that all of
the rest of the code can assume only valid data.
If any redundant information is present in the UEB+URI, the new code cross-checks and asserts
that it is all fully consistent. This closes some issues where the uploader could have
uploaded inconsistent redundant data, which would probably have caused the old downloader to
simply reject that download after getting a Python exception, but perhaps could have caused
greater harm to the old downloader.
I removed the notion of selecting an erasure codec from codec.py based on the string that was
passed in the UEB. Currently "crs" is the only such string that works, so
"_assert(codec_name == 'crs')" is simpler and more explicit. This is also in keeping with the
"validate up front" strategy -- now if someone sets a different string than "crs" in their UEB,
the downloader will reject the download in the "validate this UEB" function instead of in a
separate "select the codec instance" function.
I removed the code to check plaintext hashes and plaintext Merkle Trees. Uploaders do not
produce this information any more (since it potentially exposes confidential information about
the file), and the unit tests for it were disabled. The downloader before this patch would
check that plaintext hash or plaintext merkle tree if they were present, but not complain if
they were absent. The new downloader in this patch complains if they are present and doesn't
check them. (We might in the future re-introduce such hashes over the plaintext, but encrypt
the hashes which are stored in the UEB to preserve confidentiality. This would be a double-
check on the correctness of our own source code -- the current Merkle Tree over the ciphertext
is already sufficient to guarantee the integrity of the download unless there is a bug in our
Merkle Tree or AES implementation.)
This patch increases the lines-of-code count by 8 (from 17,770 to 17,778), and reduces the
uncovered-by-tests lines-of-code count by 24 (from 1408 to 1384). Those numbers would be more
meaningful if we omitted src/allmydata/util/ from the test-coverage statistics.
This fixes#491 (URIs do not refer to unique files in Allmydata Tahoe).
Fortunately all of the versions of Tahoe currently in use are already producing
this ciphertext hash tree when uploading, so there is no
backwards-compatibility problem with having the downloader require it to be
present.
This removes the guess-partial-information attack vector, and reduces
the amount of overhead that we consume with each file. It also introduces
a forwards-compability break: older versions of the code (before the
previous download-time "make hashes optional" patch) will be unable
to read files uploaded by this version, as they will complain about the
missing hashes. This patch is experimental, and is being pushed into
trunk to obtain test coverage. We may undo it before releasing 1.0.
Now upload or encode methods take a required argument named "convergence" which can be either None, indicating no convergent encryption at all, or a string, which is the "added secret" to be mixed in to the content hash key. If you want traditional convergent encryption behavior, set the added secret to be the empty string.
This patch also renames "content hash key" to "convergent encryption" in a argument names and variable names. (A different and larger renaming is needed in order to clarify that Tahoe supports immutable files which are not encrypted content-hash-key a.k.a. convergent encryption.)
This patch also changes a few unit tests to use non-convergent encryption, because it doesn't matter for what they are testing and non-convergent encryption is slightly faster.
This removes the guess-partial-information attack vector, and reduces
the amount of overhead that we consume with each file. It also introduces
a forwards-compability break: older versions of the code (before the
previous download-time "make hashes optional" patch) will be unable
to read files uploaded by this version, as they will complain about the
missing hashes. This patch is experimental, and is being pushed into
trunk to obtain test coverage. We may undo it before releasing 1.0.
Removing the plaintext hashes can help with the guess-partial-information
attack. This does not affect compatibility, but if and when we actually
remove any hashes from the share, that will introduce a
forwards-compatibility break: tahoe-0.9 will not be able to read such files.
This will make it easier to change RIBucketWriter in the future to reduce the wire
protocol to just open/write(offset,data)/close, and do all the structuring on the
client end. The ultimate goal is to store each bucket in a single file, to reduce
the considerable filesystem-quantization/inode overhead on the storage servers.
The only SHA-1 hash that remains is used in the permutation of nodeids,
where we need to decide if we care about performance or long-term security.
I suspect that we could use a much weaker hash (and faster) hash for
this purpose. In the long run, we'll be doing thousands of such hashes
for each file uploaded or downloaded (one per known peer).
This (compatibility-breaking) change moves much of the validation data and
encoding parameters out of the URI and into the so-called "thingA" block
(which will get a better name as soon as we find one we're comfortable with).
The URI retains the "storage_index" (a generalized term for the role that
we're currently using the verifierid for, the unique index for each file
that gets used by storage servers to decide which shares to return), the
decryption key, the needed_shares/total_shares counts (since they affect
peer selection), and the hash of the thingA block.
This shortens the URI and lets us add more kinds of validation data without
growing the URI (like plaintext merkle trees, to enable strong incremental
plaintext validation), at the cost of maybe 150 bytes of alacrity. Each
storage server holds an identical copy of the thingA block.
This is an incompatible change: new messages have been added to the storage
server interface, and the URI format has changed drastically.
