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>
===========
QEMU README
===========
QEMU is a generic and open source machine & userspace emulator and
virtualizer.
QEMU is capable of emulating a complete machine in software without any
need for hardware virtualization support. By using dynamic translation,
it achieves very good performance. QEMU can also integrate with the Xen
and KVM hypervisors to provide emulated hardware while allowing the
hypervisor to manage the CPU. With hypervisor support, QEMU can achieve
near native performance for CPUs. When QEMU emulates CPUs directly it is
capable of running operating systems made for one machine (e.g. an ARMv7
board) on a different machine (e.g. an x86_64 PC board).
QEMU is also capable of providing userspace API virtualization for Linux
and BSD kernel interfaces. This allows binaries compiled against one
architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux PPC64 ABI) to be run on a host using a
different architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux x86_64 ABI). This does not
involve any hardware emulation, simply CPU and syscall emulation.
QEMU aims to fit into a variety of use cases. It can be invoked directly
by users wishing to have full control over its behaviour and settings.
It also aims to facilitate integration into higher level management
layers, by providing a stable command line interface and monitor API.
It is commonly invoked indirectly via the libvirt library when using
open source applications such as oVirt, OpenStack and virt-manager.
QEMU as a whole is released under the GNU General Public License,
version 2. For full licensing details, consult the LICENSE file.
Documentation
=============
Documentation can be found hosted online at
`<https://www.qemu.org/documentation/>`_. The documentation for the
current development version that is available at
`<https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/>`_ is generated from the ``docs/``
folder in the source tree, and is built by `Sphinx
<https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/>`_.
Building
========
QEMU is multi-platform software intended to be buildable on all modern
Linux platforms, OS-X, Win32 (via the Mingw64 toolchain) and a variety
of other UNIX targets. The simple steps to build QEMU are:
.. code-block:: shell
mkdir build
cd build
../configure
make
Additional information can also be found online via the QEMU website:
* `<https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Linux>`_
* `<https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Mac>`_
* `<https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/W32>`_
Submitting patches
==================
The QEMU source code is maintained under the GIT version control system.
.. code-block:: shell
git clone https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu.git
When submitting patches, one common approach is to use 'git
format-patch' and/or 'git send-email' to format & send the mail to the
qemu-devel@nongnu.org mailing list. All patches submitted must contain
a 'Signed-off-by' line from the author. Patches should follow the
guidelines set out in the `style section
<https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/devel/style.html>`_ of
the Developers Guide.
Additional information on submitting patches can be found online via
the QEMU website:
* `<https://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch>`_
* `<https://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/TrivialPatches>`_
The QEMU website is also maintained under source control.
.. code-block:: shell
git clone https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu-web.git
* `<https://www.qemu.org/2017/02/04/the-new-qemu-website-is-up/>`_
A 'git-publish' utility was created to make above process less
cumbersome, and is highly recommended for making regular contributions,
or even just for sending consecutive patch series revisions. It also
requires a working 'git send-email' setup, and by default doesn't
automate everything, so you may want to go through the above steps
manually for once.
For installation instructions, please go to:
* `<https://github.com/stefanha/git-publish>`_
The workflow with 'git-publish' is:
.. code-block:: shell
$ git checkout master -b my-feature
$ # work on new commits, add your 'Signed-off-by' lines to each
$ git publish
Your patch series will be sent and tagged as my-feature-v1 if you need to refer
back to it in the future.
Sending v2:
.. code-block:: shell
$ git checkout my-feature # same topic branch
$ # making changes to the commits (using 'git rebase', for example)
$ git publish
Your patch series will be sent with 'v2' tag in the subject and the git tip
will be tagged as my-feature-v2.
Bug reporting
=============
The QEMU project uses GitLab issues to track bugs. Bugs
found when running code built from QEMU git or upstream released sources
should be reported via:
* `<https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues>`_
If using QEMU via an operating system vendor pre-built binary package, it
is preferable to report bugs to the vendor's own bug tracker first. If
the bug is also known to affect latest upstream code, it can also be
reported via GitLab.
For additional information on bug reporting consult:
* `<https://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/ReportABug>`_
ChangeLog
=========
For version history and release notes, please visit
`<https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/>`_ or look at the git history for
more detailed information.
Contact
=======
The QEMU community can be contacted in a number of ways, with the two
main methods being email and IRC:
* `<mailto:qemu-devel@nongnu.org>`_
* `<https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel>`_
* #qemu on irc.oftc.net
Information on additional methods of contacting the community can be
found online via the QEMU website:
* `<https://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/StartHere>`_
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