In an ancient version of directories, we needed a MAC on each entry. In modern times, the entire dirnode comes with a digital signature, so the MAC on each entry is redundant.
With this patch, we no longer check those MACs when reading directories, but we still produce them so that older readers will accept directories that we write.
I get confused about whether a given argument or return value is a uri-as-string or uri-as-object. This patch adds a lot of assertions that it is one or the other, and also changes CheckerResults to take objects not strings.
In the future, I hope that we generally use Python objects except when importing into or exporting from the Python interpreter e.g. over the wire, the UI, or a stored file.
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.
Removed the Checker service, removed checker results storage (both in-memory
and the tiny stub of sqlite-based storage). Added ICheckable, all
check/verify is now done by calling the check() method on filenodes and
dirnodes (immutable files, literal files, mutable files, and directory
instances).
Checker results are returned in a Results instance, with an html() method for
display. Checker results have been temporarily removed from the wui directory
listing until we make some other fixes.
Also fixed client.create_node_from_uri() to create LiteralFileNodes properly,
since they have different checking behavior. Previously we were creating full
FileNodes with LIT uris inside, which were downloadable but not checkable.
this adds a new service to pre-generate RSA key pairs. This allows
the expensive (i.e. slow) key generation to be placed into a process
outside the node, so that the node's reactor will not block when it
needs a key pair, but instead can retrieve them from a pool of already
generated key pairs in the key-generator service.
it adds a tahoe create-key-generator command which initialises an
empty dir with a tahoe-key-generator.tac file which can then be run
via twistd. it stashes its .pem and portnum for furl stability and
writes the furl of the key gen service to key_generator.furl, also
printing it to stdout.
by placing a key_generator.furl file into the nodes config directory
(e.g. ~/.tahoe) a node will attempt to connect to such a service, and
will use that when creating mutable files (i.e. directories) whenever
possible. if the keygen service is unavailable, it will perform the
key generation locally instead, as before.
Unfinished bits: doc in webapi.txt, test handling of badly formed JSON, return reasonable HTTP response, examination of the effect of this patch on code coverage -- but I'm committing it anyway because MikeB can use it and I'm being called to dinner...
* use new decentralized directories everywhere instead of old centralized directories
* provide UI to them through the web server
* provide UI to them through the CLI
* update unit tests to simulate decentralized mutable directories in order to test other components that rely on them
* remove the notion of a "vdrive server" and a client thereof
* remove the notion of a "public vdrive", which was a directory that was centrally published/subscribed automatically by the tahoe node (you can accomplish this manually by making a directory and posting the URL to it on your web site, for example)
* add a notion of "wait_for_numpeers" when you need to publish data to peers, which is how many peers should be attached before you start. The default is 1.
* add __repr__ for filesystem nodes (note: these reprs contain a few bits of the secret key!)
* fix a few bugs where we used to equate "mutable" with "not read-only". Nowadays all directories are mutable, but some might be read-only (to you).
* fix a few bugs where code wasn't aware of the new general-purpose metadata dict the comes with each filesystem edge
* sundry fixes to unit tests to adjust to the new directories, e.g. don't assume that every share on disk belongs to a chk file.
