Tag Archives: tracing

Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs

Post Syndicated from Jakub Sitnicki original https://blog.cloudflare.com/conntrack-turns-a-blind-eye-to-dropped-syns/

Intro

Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs

We have been working with conntrack, the connection tracking layer in the Linux kernel, for years. And yet, despite the collected know-how, questions about its inner workings occasionally come up. When they do, it is hard to resist the temptation to go digging for answers.

One such question popped up while writing the previous blog post on conntrack:

“Why are there no entries in the conntrack table for SYN packets dropped by the firewall?”

Ready for a deep dive into the network stack? Let’s find out.

Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs
Image by chulmin park from Pixabay

We already know from last time that conntrack is in charge of tracking incoming and outgoing network traffic. By running conntrack -L we can inspect existing network flows, or as conntrack calls them, connections.

So if we spin up a toy VM, connect to it over SSH, and inspect the contents of the conntrack table, we will see…

$ vagrant init fedora/33-cloud-base
$ vagrant up
…
$ vagrant ssh
Last login: Sun Jan 31 15:08:02 2021 from 192.168.122.1
[[email protected] ~]$ sudo conntrack -L
conntrack v1.4.5 (conntrack-tools): 0 flow entries have been shown.

… nothing!

Even though the conntrack kernel module is loaded:

[[email protected] ~]$ lsmod | grep '^nf_conntrack\b'
nf_conntrack          163840  1 nf_conntrack_netlink

Hold on a minute. Why is the SSH connection to the VM not listed in conntrack entries? SSH is working. With each keystroke we are sending packets to the VM. But conntrack doesn’t register it.

Isn’t conntrack an integral part of the network stack that sees every packet passing through it? 🤔

Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs
Based on an image by Jan Engelhardt CC BY-SA 3.0

Clearly everything we learned about conntrack last time is not the whole story.

Calling into conntrack

Our little experiment with SSH’ing into a VM begs the question — how does conntrack actually get notified about network packets passing through the stack?

We can walk the receive path step by step and we won’t find any direct calls into the conntrack code in either the IPv4 or IPv6 stack. Conntrack does not interface with the network stack directly.

Instead, it relies on the Netfilter framework, and its set of hooks baked into in the stack:

int ip_rcv(struct sk_buff *skb, struct net_device *dev, …)
{
    …
    return NF_HOOK(NFPROTO_IPV4, NF_INET_PRE_ROUTING,
               net, NULL, skb, dev, NULL,
               ip_rcv_finish);
}

Netfilter users, like conntrack, can register callbacks with it. Netfilter will then run all registered callbacks when its hook processes a network packet.

For the INET family, that is IPv4 and IPv6, there are five Netfilter hooks  to choose from:

Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs
Based on Nftables – Packet flow and Netfilter hooks in detail, thermalcircle.de, CC BY-SA 4.0

Which ones does conntrack use? We will get to that in a moment.

First, let’s focus on the trigger. What makes conntrack register its callbacks with Netfilter?

The SSH connection doesn’t show up in the conntrack table just because the module is loaded. We already saw that. This means that conntrack doesn’t register its callbacks with Netfilter at module load time.

Or at least, it doesn’t do it by default. Since Linux v5.1 (May 2019) the conntrack module has the enable_hooks parameter, which causes conntrack to register its callbacks on load:

[[email protected] ~]$ modinfo nf_conntrack
…
parm:           enable_hooks:Always enable conntrack hooks (bool)

Going back to our toy VM, let’s try to reload the conntrack module with enable_hooks set:

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo rmmod nf_conntrack_netlink nf_conntrack
[[email protected] ~]$ sudo modprobe nf_conntrack enable_hooks=1
[[email protected] ~]$ sudo conntrack -L
tcp      6 431999 ESTABLISHED src=192.168.122.204 dst=192.168.122.1 sport=22 dport=34858 src=192.168.122.1 dst=192.168.122.204 sport=34858 dport=22 [ASSURED] mark=0 secctx=system_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 use=1
conntrack v1.4.5 (conntrack-tools): 1 flow entries have been shown.
[[email protected] ~]$

Nice! The conntrack table now contains an entry for our SSH session.

The Netfilter hook notified conntrack about SSH session packets passing through the stack.

Now that we know how conntrack gets called, we can go back to our question — can we observe a TCP SYN packet dropped by the firewall with conntrack?

Listing Netfilter hooks

That is easy to check:

  1. Add a rule to drop anything coming to port tcp/25702

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo iptables -t filter -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 2570 -j DROP

2) Connect to the VM on port tcp/2570 from the outside

host $ nc -w 1 -z 192.168.122.204 2570

3) List conntrack table entries

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo conntrack -L
tcp      6 431999 ESTABLISHED src=192.168.122.204 dst=192.168.122.1 sport=22 dport=34858 src=192.168.122.1 dst=192.168.122.204 sport=34858 dport=22 [ASSURED] mark=0 secctx=system_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 use=1
conntrack v1.4.5 (conntrack-tools): 1 flow entries have been shown.

No new entries. Conntrack didn’t record a new flow for the dropped SYN.

But did it process the SYN packet? To answer that we have to find out which callbacks conntrack registered with Netfilter.

Netfilter keeps track of callbacks registered for each hook in instances of struct nf_hook_entries. We can reach these objects through the Netfilter state (struct netns_nf), which lives inside network namespace (struct net).

struct netns_nf {
    …
    struct nf_hook_entries __rcu *hooks_ipv4[NF_INET_NUMHOOKS];
    struct nf_hook_entries __rcu *hooks_ipv6[NF_INET_NUMHOOKS];
    …
}

struct nf_hook_entries, if you look at its definition, is a bit of an exotic construct. A glance at how the object size is calculated during its allocation gives a hint about its memory layout:

    struct nf_hook_entries *e;
    size_t alloc = sizeof(*e) +
               sizeof(struct nf_hook_entry) * num +
               sizeof(struct nf_hook_ops *) * num +
               sizeof(struct nf_hook_entries_rcu_head);

It’s an element count, followed by two arrays glued together, and some RCU-related state which we’re going to ignore. The two arrays have the same size, but hold different kinds of values.

We can walk the second array, holding pointers to struct nf_hook_ops, to discover the registered callbacks and their priority. Priority determines the invocation order.

Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs

With drgn, a programmable C debugger tailored for the Linux kernel, we can locate the Netfilter state in kernel memory, and walk its contents relatively easily. Given we know what we are looking for.

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo drgn
drgn 0.0.8 (using Python 3.9.1, without libkdumpfile)
…
>>> pre_routing_hook = prog['init_net'].nf.hooks_ipv4[0]
>>> for i in range(0, pre_routing_hook.num_hook_entries):
...     pre_routing_hook.hooks[i].hook
...
(nf_hookfn *)ipv4_conntrack_defrag+0x0 = 0xffffffffc092c000
(nf_hookfn *)ipv4_conntrack_in+0x0 = 0xffffffffc093f290
>>>

Neat! We have a way to access Netfilter state.

Let’s take it to the next level and list all registered callbacks for each Netfilter hook (using less than 100 lines of Python):

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo /vagrant/tools/list-nf-hooks
🪝 ipv4 PRE_ROUTING
       -400 → ipv4_conntrack_defrag     ☜ conntrack callback
       -300 → iptable_raw_hook
       -200 → ipv4_conntrack_in         ☜ conntrack callback
       -150 → iptable_mangle_hook
       -100 → nf_nat_ipv4_in

🪝 ipv4 LOCAL_IN
       -150 → iptable_mangle_hook
          0 → iptable_filter_hook
         50 → iptable_security_hook
        100 → nf_nat_ipv4_fn
 2147483647 → ipv4_confirm
…

The output from our script shows that conntrack has two callbacks registered with the PRE_ROUTING hook – ipv4_conntrack_defrag and ipv4_conntrack_in. But are they being called?

Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs
Based on Netfilter PRE_ROUTING hook, thermalcircle.de, CC BY-SA 4.0

Tracing conntrack callbacks

We expect that when the Netfilter PRE_ROUTING hook processes a TCP SYN packet, it will invoke ipv4_conntrack_defrag and then ipv4_conntrack_in callbacks.

To confirm it we will put to use the tracing powers of BPF 🐝. BPF programs can run on entry to functions. These kinds of programs are known as BPF kprobes. In our case we will attach BPF kprobes to conntrack callbacks.

Usually, when working with BPF, we would write the BPF program in C and use clang -target bpf to compile it. However, for tracing it will be much easier to use bpftrace. With bpftrace we can write our BPF kprobe program in a high-level language inspired by AWK:

kprobe:ipv4_conntrack_defrag,
kprobe:ipv4_conntrack_in
{
    $skb = (struct sk_buff *)arg1;
    $iph = (struct iphdr *)($skb->head + $skb->network_header);
    $th = (struct tcphdr *)($skb->head + $skb->transport_header);

    if ($iph->protocol == 6 /* IPPROTO_TCP */ &&
        $th->dest == 2570 /* htons(2570) */ &&
        $th->syn == 1) {
        time("%H:%M:%S ");
        printf("%s:%u > %s:%u tcp syn %s\n",
               ntop($iph->saddr),
               (uint16)($th->source << 8) | ($th->source >> 8),
               ntop($iph->daddr),
               (uint16)($th->dest << 8) | ($th->dest >> 8),
               func);
    }
}

What does this program do? It is roughly an equivalent of a tcpdump filter:

dst port 2570 and tcp[tcpflags] & tcp-syn != 0

But only for packets passing through conntrack PRE_ROUTING callbacks.

(If you haven’t used bpftrace, it comes with an excellent reference guide and gives you the ability to explore kernel data types on the fly with bpftrace -lv 'struct iphdr'.)

Let’s run the tracing program while we connect to the VM from the outside (nc -z 192.168.122.204 2570):

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo bpftrace /vagrant/tools/trace-conntrack-prerouting.bt
Attaching 3 probes...
Tracing conntrack prerouting callbacks... Hit Ctrl-C to quit
13:22:56 192.168.122.1:33254 > 192.168.122.204:2570 tcp syn ipv4_conntrack_defrag
13:22:56 192.168.122.1:33254 > 192.168.122.204:2570 tcp syn ipv4_conntrack_in
^C

[[email protected] ~]$

Conntrack callbacks have processed the TCP SYN packet destined to tcp/2570.

But if conntrack saw the packet, why is there no corresponding flow entry in the conntrack table?

Going down the rabbit hole

What actually happens inside the conntrack PRE_ROUTING callbacks?

To find out, we can trace the call chain that starts on entry to the conntrack callback. The function_graph tracer built into the Ftrace framework is perfect for this task.

But because all incoming traffic goes through the PRE_ROUTING hook, including our SSH connection, our trace will be polluted with events from SSH traffic. To avoid that, let’s switch from SSH access to a serial console.

When using libvirt as the Vagrant provider, you can connect to the serial console with virsh:

host $ virsh -c qemu:///session list
 Id   Name                State
-----------------------------------
 1    conntrack_default   running

host $ virsh -c qemu:///session console conntrack_default
Once connected to the console and logged into the VM, we can record the call chain using the trace-cmd wrapper for Ftrace:
[[email protected] ~]$ sudo trace-cmd start -p function_graph -g ipv4_conntrack_defrag -g ipv4_conntrack_in
  plugin 'function_graph'
[[email protected] ~]$ # … connect from the host with `nc -z 192.168.122.204 2570` …
[[email protected] ~]$ sudo trace-cmd stop
[[email protected] ~]$ sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/trace
# tracer: function_graph
#
# CPU  DURATION                  FUNCTION CALLS
# |     |   |                     |   |   |   |
 1)   1.219 us    |  finish_task_switch();
 1)   3.532 us    |  ipv4_conntrack_defrag [nf_defrag_ipv4]();
 1)               |  ipv4_conntrack_in [nf_conntrack]() {
 1)               |    nf_conntrack_in [nf_conntrack]() {
 1)   0.573 us    |      get_l4proto [nf_conntrack]();
 1)               |      nf_ct_get_tuple [nf_conntrack]() {
 1)   0.487 us    |        nf_ct_get_tuple_ports [nf_conntrack]();
 1)   1.564 us    |      }
 1)   0.820 us    |      hash_conntrack_raw [nf_conntrack]();
 1)   1.255 us    |      __nf_conntrack_find_get [nf_conntrack]();
 1)               |      init_conntrack.constprop.0 [nf_conntrack]() {  ❷
 1)   0.427 us    |        nf_ct_invert_tuple [nf_conntrack]();
 1)               |        __nf_conntrack_alloc [nf_conntrack]() {      ❶
                             … 
 1)   3.680 us    |        }
                           … 
 1) + 15.847 us   |      }
                         … 
 1) + 34.595 us   |    }
 1) + 35.742 us   |  }
 …
[[email protected] ~]$

What catches our attention here is the allocation, __nf_conntrack_alloc() (❶), inside init_conntrack() (❷). __nf_conntrack_alloc() creates a struct nf_conn object which represents a tracked connection.

This object is not created in vain. A glance at init_conntrack() source shows that it is pushed onto a list of unconfirmed connections3.

Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs

What does it mean that a connection is unconfirmed? As conntrack(8) man page explains:

unconfirmed:
       This table shows new entries, that are not yet inserted into the
       conntrack table. These entries are attached to packets that  are
       traversing  the  stack, but did not reach the confirmation point
       at the postrouting hook.

Perhaps we have been looking for our flow in the wrong table? Does the unconfirmed table have a record for our dropped TCP SYN?

Pulling the rabbit out of the hat

I have bad news…

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo conntrack -L unconfirmed
conntrack v1.4.5 (conntrack-tools): 0 flow entries have been shown.
[[email protected] ~]$

The flow is not present in the unconfirmed table. We have to dig deeper.

Let’s for a moment assume that a struct nf_conn object was added to the unconfirmed list. If the list is now empty, then the object must have been removed from the list before we inspected its contents.

Has an entry been removed from the unconfirmed table? What function removes entries from the unconfirmed table?

It turns out that nf_ct_add_to_unconfirmed_list() which init_conntrack() invokes, has its opposite defined just right beneath it – nf_ct_del_from_dying_or_unconfirmed_list().

It is worth a shot to check if this function is being called, and if so, from where. For that we can again use a BPF tracing program, attached to function entry. However, this time our program will record a kernel stack trace:

kprobe:nf_ct_del_from_dying_or_unconfirmed_list { @[kstack()] = count(); exit(); }

With bpftrace running our one-liner, we connect to the VM from the host with nc as before:

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo bpftrace -e 'kprobe:nf_ct_del_from_dying_or_unconfirmed_list { @[kstack()] = count(); exit(); }'
Attaching 1 probe...

@[
    nf_ct_del_from_dying_or_unconfirmed_list+1 ❹
    destroy_conntrack+78
    nf_conntrack_destroy+26
    skb_release_head_state+78
    kfree_skb+50 ❸
    nf_hook_slow+143 ❷
    ip_local_deliver+152 ❶
    ip_sublist_rcv_finish+87
    ip_sublist_rcv+387
    ip_list_rcv+293
    __netif_receive_skb_list_core+658
    netif_receive_skb_list_internal+444
    napi_complete_done+111
    …
]: 1

[[email protected] ~]$

Bingo. The conntrack delete function was called, and the captured stack trace shows that on local delivery path (❶), where LOCAL_IN Netfilter hook runs (❷), the packet is destroyed (❸). Conntrack must be getting called when sk_buff (the packet and its metadata) is destroyed. This causes conntrack to remove the unconfirmed flow entry (❹).

It makes sense. After all we have a DROP rule in the filter/INPUT chain. And that iptables -j DROP rule has a significant side effect. It cleans up an entry in the conntrack unconfirmed table!

This explains why we can’t observe the flow in the unconfirmed table. It lives for only a very short period of time.

Not convinced? You don’t have to take my word for it. I will prove it with a dirty trick!

Making the rabbit disappear, or actually appear

If you recall the output from list-nf-hooks that we’ve seen earlier, there is another conntrack callback there – ipv4_confirm, which I have ignored:

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo /vagrant/tools/list-nf-hooks
…
🪝 ipv4 LOCAL_IN
       -150 → iptable_mangle_hook
          0 → iptable_filter_hook
         50 → iptable_security_hook
        100 → nf_nat_ipv4_fn
 2147483647 → ipv4_confirm              ☜ another conntrack callback
…

ipv4_confirm is “the confirmation point” mentioned in the conntrack(8) man page. When a flow gets confirmed, it is moved from the unconfirmed table to the main conntrack table.

The callback is registered with a “weird” priority – 2,147,483,647. It’s the maximum positive value of a 32-bit signed integer can hold, and at the same time, the lowest possible priority a callback can have.

This ensures that the ipv4_confirm callback runs last. We want the flows to graduate from the unconfirmed table to the main conntrack table only once we know the corresponding packet has made it through the firewall.

Luckily for us, it is possible to have more than one callback registered with the same priority. In such cases, the order of registration matters. We can put that to use. Just for educational purposes.

Good old iptables won’t be of much help here. Its Netfilter callbacks have hard-coded priorities which we can’t change. But nftables, the iptables successor, is much more flexible in this regard. With nftables we can create a rule chain with arbitrary priority.

So this time, let’s use nftables to install a filter rule to drop traffic to port tcp/2570. The trick, though, is to register our chain before conntrack registers itself. This way our filter will run last.

First, delete the tcp/2570 drop rule in iptables and unregister conntrack.

vm # iptables -t filter -F
vm # rmmod nf_conntrack_netlink nf_conntrack

Then add tcp/2570 drop rule in nftables, with lowest possible priority.

vm # nft add table ip my_table
vm # nft add chain ip my_table my_input { type filter hook input priority 2147483647 \; }
vm # nft add rule ip my_table my_input tcp dport 2570 counter drop
vm # nft -a list ruleset
table ip my_table { # handle 1
        chain my_input { # handle 1
                type filter hook input priority 2147483647; policy accept;
                tcp dport 2570 counter packets 0 bytes 0 drop # handle 4
        }
}

Finally, re-register conntrack hooks.

vm # modprobe nf_conntrack enable_hooks=1

The registered callbacks for the LOCAL_IN hook now look like this:

vm # /vagrant/tools/list-nf-hooks
…
🪝 ipv4 LOCAL_IN
       -150 → iptable_mangle_hook
          0 → iptable_filter_hook
         50 → iptable_security_hook
        100 → nf_nat_ipv4_fn
 2147483647 → ipv4_confirm, nft_do_chain_ipv4
…

What happens if we connect to port tcp/2570 now?

vm # conntrack -L
tcp      6 115 SYN_SENT src=192.168.122.1 dst=192.168.122.204 sport=54868 dport=2570 [UNREPLIED] src=192.168.122.204 dst=192.168.122.1 sport=2570 dport=54868 mark=0 secctx=system_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 use=1
conntrack v1.4.5 (conntrack-tools): 1 flow entries have been shown.

We have fooled conntrack 💥

Conntrack promoted the flow from the unconfirmed to the main conntrack table despite the fact that the firewall dropped the packet. We can observe it.

Outro

Conntrack processes every received packet4 and creates a flow for it. A flow entry is always created even if the packet is dropped shortly after. The flow might never be promoted to the main conntrack table and can be short lived.

However, this blog post is not really about conntrack. Its internals have been covered by magazines, papers, books, and on other blogs long before. We probably could have learned elsewhere all that has been shown here.

For us, conntrack was really just an excuse to demonstrate various ways to discover the inner workings of the Linux network stack. As good as any other.

Today we have powerful introspection tools like drgn, bpftrace, or Ftrace, and a cross referencer to plow through the source code, at our fingertips. They help us look under the hood of a live operating system and gradually deepen our understanding of its workings.

I have to warn you, though. Once you start digging into the kernel, it is hard to stop…

………..
1Actually since Linux v5.10 (Dec 2020) there is an additional Netfilter hook for the INET family named NF_INET_INGRESS. The new hook type allows users to attach nftables chains to the Traffic Control ingress hook.
2Why did I pick this port number? Because 2570 = 0x0a0a. As we will see later, this saves us the trouble of converting between the network byte order and the host byte order.
3To be precise, there are multiple lists of unconfirmed connections. One per each CPU. This is a common pattern in the kernel. Whenever we want to prevent CPUs from contending for access to a shared state, we give each CPU a private instance of the state.
4Unless we explicitly exclude it from being tracked with iptables -j NOTRACK.

Me on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/me_on_covad-19_.html

I was quoted in BuzzFeed:

“My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value,” Bruce Schneier, a privacy expert and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, told BuzzFeed News. “I’m not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mean the efficacy. Does anybody think this will do something useful? … This is just something governments want to do for the hell of it. To me, it’s just techies doing techie things because they don’t know what else to do.”

I haven’t blogged about this because I thought it was obvious. But from the tweets and emails I have received, it seems not.

This is a classic identification problem, and efficacy depends on two things: false positives and false negatives.

  • False positives: Any app will have a precise definition of a contact: let’s say it’s less than six feet for more than ten minutes. The false positive rate is the percentage of contacts that don’t result in transmissions. This will be because of several reasons. One, the app’s location and proximity systems — based on GPS and Bluetooth — just aren’t accurate enough to capture every contact. Two, the app won’t be aware of any extenuating circumstances, like walls or partitions. And three, not every contact results in transmission; the disease has some transmission rate that’s less than 100% (and I don’t know what that is).
  • False negatives: This is the rate the app fails to register a contact when an infection occurs. This also will be because of several reasons. One, errors in the app’s location and proximity systems. Two, transmissions that occur from people who don’t have the app (even Singapore didn’t get above a 20% adoption rate for the app). And three, not every transmission is a result of that precisely defined contact — the virus sometimes travels further.

Assume you take the app out grocery shopping with you and it subsequently alerts you of a contact. What should you do? It’s not accurate enough for you to quarantine yourself for two weeks. And without ubiquitous, cheap, fast, and accurate testing, you can’t confirm the app’s diagnosis. So the alert is useless.

Similarly, assume you take the app out grocery shopping and it doesn’t alert you of any contact. Are you in the clear? No, you’re not. You actually have no idea if you’ve been infected.

The end result is an app that doesn’t work. People will post their bad experiences on social media, and people will read those posts and realize that the app is not to be trusted. That loss of trust is even worse than having no app at all.

It has nothing to do with privacy concerns. The idea that contact tracing can be done with an app, and not human health professionals, is just plain dumb.

EDITED TO ADD: This Brookings essay makes much the same point.

Contact Tracing COVID-19 Infections via Smartphone Apps

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/contact_tracing.html

Google and Apple have announced a joint project to create a privacy-preserving COVID-19 contact tracing app. (Details, such as we have them, are here.) It’s similar to the app being developed at MIT, and similar to others being described and developed elsewhere. It’s nice seeing the privacy protections; they’re well thought out.

I was going to write a long essay about the security and privacy concerns, but Ross Anderson beat me to it. (Note that some of his comments are UK-specific.)

First, it isn’t anonymous. Covid-19 is a notifiable disease so a doctor who diagnoses you must inform the public health authorities, and if they have the bandwidth they call you and ask who you’ve been in contact with. They then call your contacts in turn. It’s not about consent or anonymity, so much as being persuasive and having a good bedside manner.

I’m relaxed about doing all this under emergency public-health powers, since this will make it harder for intrusive systems to persist after the pandemic than if they have some privacy theater that can be used to argue that the whizzy new medi-panopticon is legal enough to be kept running.

Second, contact tracers have access to all sorts of other data such as public transport ticketing and credit-card records. This is how a contact tracer in Singapore is able to phone you and tell you that the taxi driver who took you yesterday from Orchard Road to Raffles has reported sick, so please put on a mask right now and go straight home. This must be controlled; Taiwan lets public-health staff access such material in emergencies only.

Third, you can’t wait for diagnoses. In the UK, you only get a test if you’re a VIP or if you get admitted to hospital. Even so the results take 1-3 days to come back. While the VIPs share their status on twitter or facebook, the other diagnosed patients are often too sick to operate their phones.

Fourth, the public health authorities need geographical data for purposes other than contact tracing – such as to tell the army where to build more field hospitals, and to plan shipments of scarce personal protective equipment. There are already apps that do symptom tracking but more would be better. So the UK app will ask for the first three characters of your postcode, which is about enough to locate which hospital you’d end up in.

Fifth, although the cryptographers – and now Google and Apple – are discussing more anonymous variants of the Singapore app, that’s not the problem. Anyone who’s worked on abuse will instantly realise that a voluntary app operated by anonymous actors is wide open to trolling. The performance art people will tie a phone to a dog and let it run around the park; the Russians will use the app to run service-denial attacks and spread panic; and little Johnny will self-report symptoms to get the whole school sent home.

I recommend reading his essay in full. Also worth reading are this EFF essay, and this ACLU white paper.

To me, the real problems aren’t around privacy and security. The efficacy of any app-based contact tracing is still unproven. A “contact” from the point of view of an app isn’t the same as an epidemiological contact. And the ratio of infections to contacts is high. We would have to deal with the false positives (being close to someone else, but separated by a partition or other barrier) and the false negatives (not being close to someone else, but contracting the disease through a mutually touched object). And without cheap, fast, and accurate testing, the information from any of these apps isn’t very useful. So I agree with Ross that this is primarily an exercise in that false syllogism: Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it. It’s techies proposing tech solutions to what is primarily a social problem.

EDITED TO ADD: Susan Landau on contact tracing apps and how they’re being oversold. And Farzad Mostashari, former coordinator for health IT at the Department of Health and Human Services, on contact tracing apps.

As long as 1) every contact does not result in an infection, and 2) a large percentage of people with the disease are asymptomatic and don’t realize they have it, I can’t see how this sort of app is valuable. If we had cheap, fast, and accurate testing for everyone on demand…maybe. But I still don’t think so.

EDITED TO ADD (4/15): More details from Apple and Google.

Integrating AWS X-Ray with AWS App Mesh

Post Syndicated from Ignacio Riesgo original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/integrating-aws-x-ray-with-aws-app-mesh/

This post is contributed by Lulu Zhao | Software Development Engineer II, AWS

 

AWS X-Ray helps developers and DevOps engineers quickly understand how an application and its underlying services are performing. When it’s integrated with AWS App Mesh, the combination makes for a powerful analytical tool.

X-Ray helps to identify and troubleshoot the root causes of errors and performance issues. It’s capable of analyzing and debugging distributed applications, including those based on a microservices architecture. It offers insights into the impact and reach of errors and performance problems.

In this post, I demonstrate how to integrate it with App Mesh.

Overview

App Mesh is a service mesh based on the Envoy proxy that makes it easy to monitor and control microservices. App Mesh standardizes how your microservices communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and helping to ensure high application availability.

With App Mesh, it’s easy to maintain consistent visibility and network traffic control for services built across multiple types of compute infrastructure. App Mesh configures each service to export monitoring data and implements consistent communications control logic across your application.

A service mesh is like a communication layer for microservices. All communication between services happens through the mesh. Customers use App Mesh to configure a service mesh that contains virtual services, virtual nodes, virtual routes, and corresponding routes.

However, it’s challenging to visualize the way that request traffic flows through the service mesh while attempting to identify latency and other types of performance issues. This is particularly true as the number of microservices increases.

It’s in exactly this area where X-Ray excels. To show a detailed workflow inside a service mesh, I implemented a tracing extension called X-Ray tracer inside Envoy. With it, I ensure that I’m tracing all inbound and outbound calls that are routed through Envoy.

Traffic routing with color app

The following example shows how X-Ray works with App Mesh. I used the Color App, a simple demo application, to showcase traffic routing.

This app has two Go applications that are included in the AWS X-Ray Go SDK: color-gateway and color-teller. The color-gateway application is exposed to external clients and responds to http://service-name:port/color, which retrieves color from color-teller. I deployed color-app using Amazon ECS. This image illustrates how color-gateway routes traffic into a virtual router and then into separate nodes using color-teller.

 

The following image shows client interactions with App Mesh in an X-Ray service map after requests have been made to the color-gateway and to color-teller.

Integration

There are two types of service nodes:

  • AWS::AppMesh::Proxy is generated by the X-Ray tracing extension inside Envoy.
  • AWS::ECS::Container is generated by the AWS X-Ray Go SDK.

The service graph arrows show the request workflow, which you may find helpful as you try to understand the relationships between services.

To send Envoy-generated segments into X-Ray, install the X-Ray daemon. The following code example shows the ECS task definition used to install the daemon into the container.

{
    "name": "xray-daemon",

    "image": "amazon/aws-xray-daemon",

    "user": "1337",

    "essential": true,

    "cpu": 32,

    "memoryReservation": 256,

    "portMappings": [

        {

            "hostPort": 2000,

            "containerPort": 2000,

            "protocol": "udp"

         }

After the Color app successfully launched, I made a request to color-gateway to fetch a color.

  • First, the Envoy proxy appmesh/colorgateway-vn in front of default-gateway received the request and routed it to the server default-gateway.
  • Then, default-gateway made a request to server default-colorteller-white to retrieve the color.
  • Instead of directly calling the color-teller server, the request went to the default-gateway Envoy proxy and the proxy routed the call to color-teller.

That’s the advantage of using the Envoy proxy. Envoy is a self-contained process that is designed to run in parallel with all application servers. All of the Envoy proxies form a transparent communication mesh through which each application sends and receives messages to and from localhost while remaining unaware of the broader network topology.

For App Mesh integration, the X-Ray tracer records the mesh name and virtual node name values and injects them into the segment JSON document. Here is an example:

“aws”: {
	“app_mesh”: {
		“mesh_name”: “appmesh”,
		“virtual_node_name”: “colorgateway-vn”
	}
},

To enable X-Ray tracing through App Mesh inside Envoy, you must set two environment variable configurations:

  • ENABLE_ENVOY_XRAY_TRACING
  • XRAY_DAEMON_PORT

The first one enables X-Ray tracing using 127.0.0.1:2000 as the default daemon endpoint to which generated segments are sent. If the daemon you installed listens on a different port, you can specify a port value to override the default X-Ray daemon port by using the second configuration.

Conclusion

Currently, AWS X-Ray supports SDKs written in multiple languages (including Java, Python, Go, .NET, and .NET Core, Node.js, and Ruby) to help you implement your services. For more information, see Getting Started with AWS X-Ray.

Kernel 4.17 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/756373/rss

Linus has released the 4.17 kernel, which
will indeed be called “4.17”.
“No, I didn’t call it 5.0, even though all the git object count
numerology was in place for that. It will happen in the not _too_
distant future, and I’m told all the release scripts on kernel.org are
ready for it, but I didn’t feel there was any real reason for it.”

Headline features in this release include
improved load estimation in the CPU
scheduler,
raw
BPF tracepoints,
lazytime support in the XFS filesystem,
full in-kernel TLS protocol support,
histogram triggers for tracing,
mitigations for the latest Spectre variants,
and, of course, the removal of support for eight unloved processor
architectures.

All Systems Go! 2018 CfP Open

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original http://0pointer.net/blog/all-systems-go-2018-cfp-open.html

The All Systems Go! 2018 Call for Participation is Now Open!

The Call for Participation (CFP) for All Systems Go!
2018 is now open. We’d like to invite you
to submit your proposals for consideration to the CFP submission
site.

ASG image

The CFP will close on July 30th. Notification of acceptance and
non-acceptance will go out within 7 days of the closing of the CFP.

All topics relevant to foundational open-source Linux technologies are
welcome. In particular, however, we are looking for proposals
including, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Low-level container executors and infrastructure
  • IoT and embedded OS infrastructure
  • BPF and eBPF filtering
  • OS, container, IoT image delivery and updating
  • Building Linux devices and applications
  • Low-level desktop technologies
  • Networking
  • System and service management
  • Tracing and performance measuring
  • IPC and RPC systems
  • Security and Sandboxing

While our focus is definitely more on the user-space side of things,
talks about kernel projects are welcome, as long as they have a clear
and direct relevance for user-space.

For more information please visit our conference
website!

[$] Using user-space tracepoints with BPF

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/753601/rss

Much has been written on LWN about dynamically instrumenting kernel
code. These features are also available to user-space code with a
special kind of probe known as a User Statically-Defined Tracing
(USDT) probe. These probes provide a low-overhead way of
instrumenting user-space code and provide a convenient way to debug applications
running in production. In this final article of the BPF and BCC series
we’ll look at where USDT probes come from and how you can use them to
understand the behavior of your own applications.

Tracing Stolen Bitcoin

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/tracing_stolen_.html

Ross Anderson has a really interesting paper on tracing stolen bitcoin. From a blog post:

Previous attempts to track tainted coins had used either the “poison” or the “haircut” method. Suppose I open a new address and pay into it three stolen bitcoin followed by seven freshly-mined ones. Then under poison, the output is ten stolen bitcoin, while under haircut it’s ten bitcoin that are marked 30% stolen. After thousands of blocks, poison tainting will blacklist millions of addresses, while with haircut the taint gets diffused, so neither is very effective at tracking stolen property. Bitcoin due-diligence services supplant haircut taint tracking with AI/ML, but the results are still not satisfactory.

We discovered that, back in 1816, the High Court had to tackle this problem in Clayton’s case, which involved the assets and liabilities of a bank that had gone bust. The court ruled that money must be tracked through accounts on the basis of first-in, first out (FIFO); the first penny into an account goes to satisfy the first withdrawal, and so on.

Ilia Shumailov has written software that applies FIFO tainting to the blockchain and the results are impressive, with a massive improvement in precision. What’s more, FIFO taint tracking is lossless, unlike haircut; so in addition to tracking a stolen coin forward to find where it’s gone, you can start with any UTXO and trace it backwards to see its entire ancestry. It’s not just good law; it’s good computer science too.