qemu/qapi
Eric Blake dbf946c251 nbd/server: CVE-2024-7409: Cap default max-connections to 100
Allowing an unlimited number of clients to any web service is a recipe
for a rudimentary denial of service attack: the client merely needs to
open lots of sockets without closing them, until qemu no longer has
any more fds available to allocate.

For qemu-nbd, we default to allowing only 1 connection unless more are
explicitly asked for (-e or --shared); this was historically picked as
a nice default (without an explicit -t, a non-persistent qemu-nbd goes
away after a client disconnects, without needing any additional
follow-up commands), and we are not going to change that interface now
(besides, someday we want to point people towards qemu-storage-daemon
instead of qemu-nbd).

But for qemu proper, and the newer qemu-storage-daemon, the QMP
nbd-server-start command has historically had a default of unlimited
number of connections, in part because unlike qemu-nbd it is
inherently persistent until nbd-server-stop.  Allowing multiple client
sockets is particularly useful for clients that can take advantage of
MULTI_CONN (creating parallel sockets to increase throughput),
although known clients that do so (such as libnbd's nbdcopy) typically
use only 8 or 16 connections (the benefits of scaling diminish once
more sockets are competing for kernel attention).  Picking a number
large enough for typical use cases, but not unlimited, makes it
slightly harder for a malicious client to perform a denial of service
merely by opening lots of connections withot progressing through the
handshake.

This change does not eliminate CVE-2024-7409 on its own, but reduces
the chance for fd exhaustion or unlimited memory usage as an attack
surface.  On the other hand, by itself, it makes it more obvious that
with a finite limit, we have the problem of an unauthenticated client
holding 100 fds opened as a way to block out a legitimate client from
being able to connect; thus, later patches will further add timeouts
to reject clients that are not making progress.

This is an INTENTIONAL change in behavior, and will break any client
of nbd-server-start that was not passing an explicit max-connections
parameter, yet expects more than 100 simultaneous connections.  We are
not aware of any such client (as stated above, most clients aware of
MULTI_CONN get by just fine on 8 or 16 connections, and probably cope
with later connections failing by relying on the earlier connections;
libvirt has not yet been passing max-connections, but generally
creates NBD servers with the intent for a single client for the sake
of live storage migration; meanwhile, the KubeSAN project anticipates
a large cluster sharing multiple clients [up to 8 per node, and up to
100 nodes in a cluster], but it currently uses qemu-nbd with an
explicit --shared=0 rather than qemu-storage-daemon with
nbd-server-start).

We considered using a deprecation period (declare that omitting
max-parameters is deprecated, and make it mandatory in 3 releases -
then we don't need to pick an arbitrary default); that has zero risk
of breaking any apps that accidentally depended on more than 100
connections, and where such breakage might not be noticed under unit
testing but only under the larger loads of production usage.  But it
does not close the denial-of-service hole until far into the future,
and requires all apps to change to add the parameter even if 100 was
good enough.  It also has a drawback that any app (like libvirt) that
is accidentally relying on an unlimited default should seriously
consider their own CVE now, at which point they are going to change to
pass explicit max-connections sooner than waiting for 3 qemu releases.
Finally, if our changed default breaks an app, that app can always
pass in an explicit max-parameters with a larger value.

It is also intentional that the HMP interface to nbd-server-start is
not changed to expose max-connections (any client needing to fine-tune
things should be using QMP).

Suggested-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Message-ID: <20240807174943.771624-12-eblake@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
[ericb: Expand commit message to summarize Dan's argument for why we
break corner-case back-compat behavior without a deprecation period]
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
(cherry picked from commit c8a76dbd90)
Signed-off-by: Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru>
(Mjt: minor fixups in qapi/block-export.json)
2024-08-11 11:00:05 +03:00
..
acpi.json qapi: fix example of ACPI_DEVICE_OST event 2022-03-31 12:35:59 +02:00
audio.json audio: Add sndio backend 2022-09-27 07:32:31 +02:00
authz.json qapi/qom: Add ObjectOptions for authz-* 2021-03-19 10:17:13 +01:00
block-core.json qapi/block-core: Fix BlockdevOptionsNvmeIoUring @path description 2022-11-10 14:46:27 +01:00
block-export.json nbd/server: CVE-2024-7409: Cap default max-connections to 100 2024-08-11 11:00:05 +03:00
block.json block: add more commands to preconfig mode 2022-06-14 16:50:30 +02:00
char.json qapi: Stop using whitespace for alignment in comments 2022-05-16 07:26:25 +02:00
common.json qapi: Drop unnecessary empty lines in comments 2022-05-16 07:22:28 +02:00
compat.json qapi: Belatedly adjust limitations documentation 2022-02-28 11:39:35 +01:00
control.json qapi: Stop using whitespace for alignment in comments 2022-05-16 07:26:25 +02:00
crypto.json qapi: crypto-akcipher: Introduce akcipher types to qapi 2022-05-26 11:41:42 +01:00
dump.json qapi: fix example of query-dump-guest-memory-capability command 2022-09-07 15:10:13 +02:00
error.json schemas: Add vim modeline 2020-08-03 08:28:08 +02:00
introspect.json qapi: Add feature flags to enum members 2021-10-27 17:18:55 +02:00
job.json qapi: Drop unnecessary empty lines outside of comments 2022-05-16 07:22:28 +02:00
machine-target.json target/loongarch: Implement qmp_query_cpu_definitions() 2022-06-06 18:09:03 +00:00
machine.json qmp/hmp, device_tree.c: introduce dumpdtb 2022-10-17 16:15:10 -03:00
meson.build qga: Allow building of the guest agent without system emulators or tools 2022-11-11 09:17:45 +01:00
migration.json qapi: fix examples of events missing timestamp 2022-09-07 15:10:13 +02:00
misc-target.json qapi: Drop unnecessary whitespace in comments 2022-05-16 07:22:28 +02:00
misc.json vfio-user: run vfio-user context 2022-06-15 16:43:42 +01:00
net.json net: stream: add QAPI events to report connection state 2022-10-28 13:28:52 +08:00
opts-visitor.c qapi, qemu-options: make all parsing visitors parse boolean options the same 2020-11-04 12:00:40 -05:00
pci.json qapi: Normalize version references x.y.0 to just x.y 2020-12-10 17:16:44 +01:00
pragma.json qapi/pragma: Tidy up comments 2022-05-16 07:31:26 +02:00
qapi-clone-visitor.c qapi: Make visitor functions taking Error ** return bool, not void 2020-07-10 15:18:08 +02:00
qapi-dealloc-visitor.c qapi: Make visitor functions taking Error ** return bool, not void 2020-07-10 15:18:08 +02:00
qapi-forward-visitor.c qapi: remove needless include 2022-03-22 14:46:18 +04:00
qapi-schema.json qmp: add QMP command x-query-virtio 2022-10-09 16:38:45 -04:00
qapi-type-helpers.c monitor: introduce HumanReadableText and HMP support 2021-11-02 15:55:13 +00:00
qapi-util.c qapi: Fix stale reference to scripts/qapi.py in a comment 2022-02-28 11:39:35 +01:00
qapi-visit-core.c qapi: Factor out compat_policy_input_ok() 2021-10-29 21:27:20 +02:00
qdev.json qapi: fix example of DEVICE_UNPLUG_GUEST_ERROR event 2022-09-07 15:10:13 +02:00
qmp-dispatch.c monitor: only run coroutine commands in qemu_aio_context 2024-01-26 19:40:19 +03:00
qmp-event.c Replace qemu_gettimeofday() with g_get_real_time() 2022-04-06 10:50:37 +02:00
qmp-registry.c qapi: Generalize command policy checking 2021-10-29 18:24:46 +02:00
qobject-input-visitor.c include: add qemu/keyval.h 2022-04-21 17:03:51 +04:00
qobject-output-visitor.c qapi: Extend -compat to set policy for unstable interfaces 2021-10-29 21:28:01 +02:00
qom.json qapi/qom: Document feature unstable of @x-vfio-user-server 2024-07-19 19:59:34 +03:00
rdma.json schemas: Add vim modeline 2020-08-03 08:28:08 +02:00
replay.json qapi: Drop unnecessary empty lines in comments 2022-05-16 07:22:28 +02:00
rocker.json schemas: Add vim modeline 2020-08-03 08:28:08 +02:00
run-state.json reset: allow registering handlers that aren't called by snapshot loading 2022-10-27 11:34:31 +01:00
sockets.json qapi: Stop using whitespace for alignment in comments 2022-05-16 07:26:25 +02:00
stats.json monitor: add support for boolean statistics 2022-07-18 18:51:17 +02:00
string-input-visitor.c qapi, qemu-options: make all parsing visitors parse boolean options the same 2020-11-04 12:00:40 -05:00
string-output-visitor.c qapi: remove needless include 2022-03-22 14:46:18 +04:00
tpm.json qapi: Convert simple union TpmTypeOptions to flat one 2021-09-27 08:22:25 +02:00
trace-events qapi: Generalize struct member policy checking 2021-10-29 18:23:09 +02:00
trace.h trace: switch position of headers to what Meson requires 2020-08-21 06:18:24 -04:00
trace.json qapi: fix example of trace-event-get-state command 2022-04-05 12:30:45 +02:00
transaction.json qapi: deprecate drive-backup 2021-11-09 18:21:19 +01:00
ui.json gtk: Add show_menubar=on|off command line option. 2022-10-12 14:33:54 +02:00
virtio.json Fix several typos in documentation (found by codespell) 2022-11-11 09:39:25 +01:00
yank.json Introduce yank feature 2021-01-13 10:21:17 +01:00