Re: [PATCH] Avoid mixing custom and OpenSSL BIO functions - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Mon, Feb 12, 2024 at 9:38 AM Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se> wrote:

> On 11 Feb 2024, at 19:19, David Benjamin <davidben@google.com> wrote:
> It turns out the parts that came from the OpenSSL socket BIO were a no-op, and in fact PostgreSQL is relying on it being a no-op. Instead, it's cleaner to just define a custom BIO the normal way, which then leaves the more standard BIO_get_data mechanism usable. This also avoids the risk that a future OpenSSL will add a now BIO_ctrl to the socket type, with libssl calling into it, and then break some assumptions made by PostgreSQL.

+               case BIO_CTRL_FLUSH:
+                       /* libssl expects all BIOs to support BIO_flush. */
+                       res = 1;
+                       break;

Will this always be true?  Returning 1 implies that we have flushed all data on
the socket, but what if we just before called BIO_set_retry..XX()?

The real one is also just a no-op. :-)

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/master/crypto/bio/bss_sock.c#L215

This is used in places like buffer BIO or the FILE* BIO, where BIO_write might accept data, but stage it into a buffer, to be flushed later. libssl ends up calling BIO_flush at the end of every flight, which in turn means that BIOs used with libssl need to support it, even if to return true because there's nothing to flush. (Arguably TCP sockets could have used a flush concept, to help control Nagle's algorithm, but for better or worse, that's a socket-wide TCP_NODELAY option, rather than an explicit flush call.)

BIO_set_retry.. behaves like POSIX I/O, where a failed EWOULDBLOCK write is as if you never wrote to the socket at all and doesn't impact socket state. That is, the data hasn't been accepted yet. It's not expected for BIO_flush to care about the rejected write data. (Also I don't believe libssl will ever trigger this case.) It's confusing because unlike an EWOULDBLOCK errno, BIO_set_retry.. is itself BIO state, but that's just because the BIO calling convention is goofy and didn't just return the error out of the return value. So OpenSSL just stashes the bit on the BIO itself, for you to query out immediately afterwards.

 

> I've attached a patch which does that. The existing SSL tests pass with it, tested on Debian stable. (Though it took me a few iterations to figure out how to run the SSL tests, so it's possible I've missed something.)

We've done a fair bit of work on making them easier to run, so I'm curious if
you saw any room for improvements there as someone coming to them for the first
time?

 A lot of my time was just trying to figure out how to run the tests in the first place, so perhaps documentation? But I may just have been looking in the wrong spot and honestly didn't really know what I was doing. I can try to summarize what I did (from memory), and perhaps that can point to possible improvements?

- I looked in the repository for instructions on running the tests and couldn't find any. At this point, I hadn't found src/test/README.

- I found https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Developer_FAQ#How_do_I_test_my_changes.3F, linked from https://www.postgresql.org/developer/

- I ran the configure build with --enable-cassert, ran make check, tests passed.

- I wrote my patch and then spent a while intentionally adding bugs to see if the tests would catch it (I wasn't sure whether there was ssl test coverage), finally concluding that I wasn't running any ssl tests

- I looked some more and found src/test/ssl/README

- I reconfigured with --enable-tap-tests and ran make check PG_TEST_EXTRA=ssl per those instructions, but the SSL tests still weren't running

- I grepped for PG_TEST_EXTRA and found references in the CI config, but using the meson build

- I installed meson, mimicked a few commands from the CI. That seemed to work.

- I tried running only the ssl tests, looking up how you specify individual tests in meson, to make my compile/test cycles a bit faster, but they failed.

- I noticed that the first couple "tests" were named like setup tasks, and guessed that the ssl tests depended on this setup to run. But by then I just gave up and waited out the whole test suite per run. :-)

Once I got it running, it was quite smooth. I just wasn't sure how to do it.

David