From: Florian Westphal <fw@strlen.de>
To: Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org>
Cc: Florian Westphal <fw@strlen.de>, netfilter-devel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH nf 0/4] netfilter: conntrack: allow insertion of clashing entries
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2020 21:12:40 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200217201240.GH19559@breakpoint.cc> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200217192546.pa26vfni4kmhlpng@salvia>
Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 03, 2020 at 05:37:03PM +0100, Florian Westphal wrote:
> > This series allows conntrack to insert a duplicate conntrack entry
> > if the reply direction doesn't result in a clash with a different
> > original connection.
>
> Applied, thanks for your patience.
>
> I introduced the late clash resolution approach to deal with nfqueue,
> now this is extended to cover more cases, let's give it a try.
Yes, nfqueue is one way this can happen, changes to resolver libraries
to issue parallel requests have exposed this race for non-nfqueue case
too.
> >Alternatives considered were:
> >1. Confirm ct entries at allocation time, not in postrouting.
> > a. will cause uneccesarry work when the skb that creates the
> > conntrack is dropped by ruleset.
> > b. in case nat is applied, ct entry would need to be moved in
> > the table, which requires another spinlock pair to be taken.
> > c. breaks the 'unconfirmed entry is private to cpu' assumption:
> > we would need to guard all nfct->ext allocation requests with
> > ct->lock spinlock.
> >
> >2. Make the unconfirmed list a hash table instead of a pcpu list.
> > Shares drawback c) of the first alternative.
>
> The spinlock would need to be grabbed rarely, right? My mean, most
> extension allocations happen before insertion to the unconfirmed list.
> Only _ext_add() invocations coming after init_conntrack() might
> require this.
Right, we could add __nf_ct_ext_add() which is unlocked and convert
the additions happening before unconfirmed list insertion there.
But there are additional problems that I forgot:
a) need for one additional lookup after negative result from main table
(this time in unconfirmed list).
b) Need to asynchronously re-insert the skb at a later time, once
the racing entry is confirmed.
We can't use the unconfirmed ct as-is, because it may be incomplete.
For instance, the racing skb might not yet have hit the nat table, so
the ct contains wrong NAT info.
I think b) is a non-starter for all of the alternatives, unfortunately.
prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-02-17 20:12 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-02-03 16:37 [PATCH nf 0/4] netfilter: conntrack: allow insertion of clashing entries Florian Westphal
2020-02-03 16:37 ` [PATCH nf 1/4] netfilter: conntrack: remove two args from resolve_clash Florian Westphal
2020-02-03 16:37 ` [PATCH nf 2/4] netfilter: conntrack: place confirm-bit setting in a helper Florian Westphal
2020-02-03 16:37 ` [PATCH nf 3/4] netfilter: conntrack: split resolve_clash function Florian Westphal
2020-02-03 16:37 ` [PATCH nf 4/4] netfilter: conntrack: allow insertion of clashing entries Florian Westphal
2020-02-17 19:25 ` [PATCH nf 0/4] " Pablo Neira Ayuso
2020-02-17 20:12 ` Florian Westphal [this message]
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