Re: [RFC v3 36/45] NFSv4: Fix GETATTR bitmap verification

[Trond Myklebust]

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 5:05 PM, Andreas GrÃnbacher
<andreas.gruenbacher@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 2015-05-28 22:50 GMT+02:00 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:33 PM, J. Bruce Fields <bfields@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 01:04:33PM +0200, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
>>>> The NFSv4 client sends the server GETATTR requests with different sets of
>>>> requested attributes depending on the situation.  The requested set of
>>>> attributes is encoded in a bitmap; the server replies with the set of
>>>> attributes it could return.  These bitmaps can be several words wide.  The
>>>> bitmap returned by the server is a subset of the bitmap sent by the client.
>>>>
>>>> While decoding the reply, the client tries to verify the reply bitmap: it
>>>> checks if any previous, unexpected attributes are left in the same word of the
>>>> bitmap for each attribute it tries to decode, then it clears the current
>>>> attribute's bit in the bitmap for the next decode function.
>>>>
>>>> The client fails to detect when unexpected attributes are sent after the last
>>>> expected attribute in each word in the bitmap.
>>>
>>> Is it important that the client catch that?
>>
>> Right. What is the actual problem or bug that this patch is trying to
>> fix? Why do we care if a buggy server sends us extra info that we
>> didn't ask for?
>
> I think we do care to correctly decode (and reject) well-formed but illegal
> server replies. In this case, when switching to the next word of a bitmap, the
> client doesn't check if the previous word has been completely "consumed" yet.
> If any attributes are "missed", decoding the attribute values gets out of sync,
> garbage is decoded, and the error may be missed.
>

We already do this kind of check with the existing code. What's wrong with it?

Trond
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