Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] btrfs: add authentication support

[Qu Wenruo <quwenruo.btrfs@gmx.com>]

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On 2020/5/5 下午8:36, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
> On 5/5/20 3:55 AM, Johannes Thumshirn wrote:
>> On 04/05/2020 23:59, Richard Weinberger wrote:
>>> Eric already raised doubts, let me ask more directly.
>>> Does the checksum tree really cover all moving parts of BTRFS?
>>>
>>> I'm a little surprised how small your patch is.
>>> Getting all this done for UBIFS was not easy and given that UBIFS is truly
>>> copy-on-write it was still less work than it would be for other filesystems.
>>>
>>> If I understand the checksum tree correctly, the main purpose is protecting
>>> you from flipping bits.
>>> An attacker will perform much more sophisticated attacks.
>>
>> [ Adding Jeff with whom I did the design work ]
>>
>> The checksum tree only covers the file-system payload. But combined with 
>> the checksum field, which is the start of every on-disk structure, we 
>> have all parts of the filesystem checksummed.
> 
> That the checksums were originally intended for bitflip protection isn't
> really relevant.  Using a different algorithm doesn't change the
> fundamentals and the disk format was designed to use larger checksums
> than crc32c.  The checksum tree covers file data.  The contextual
> information is in the metadata describing the disk blocks and all the
> metadata blocks have internal checksums that would also be
> authenticated.  The only weak spot is that there has been a historical
> race where a user submits a write using direct i/o and modifies the data
> while in flight.  This will cause CRC failures already and that would
> still happen with this.
> 
> All that said, the biggest weak spot I see in the design was mentioned
> on LWN: We require the key to mount the file system at all and there's
> no way to have a read-only but still verifiable file system.  That's
> worth examining further.

That can be done easily, with something like ignore_auth mount option to
completely skip hmac csum check (of course, need full RO mount, no log
replay, no way to remount rw), completely rely on bytenr/gen/first_key
and tree-checker to verify the fs.

Thanks,
Qu

> 
> -Jeff
> 


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