Re: [PATCH v2 net 3/7] tcp: resalt the secret every 10 seconds

[Jason A. Donenfeld]

Hi Eric,

On Thu, Apr 28, 2022 at 02:39:57PM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> From: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@xxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> In order to limit the ability for an observer to recognize the source
> ports sequence used to contact a set of destinations, we should
> periodically shuffle the secret. 10 seconds looks effective enough
Nit: "periodically re-salt the input".
> without causing particular issues.

Just FYI, moving from siphash_3u32 to siphash_4u32 is not free, as it
bumps us up from siphash_3u32 to siphash_2u64, which does two more
siphash rounds. Maybe this doesn't matter much, but just FYI.

I wonder, though, about your "10 seconds looks effective enough without
causing particular issues." I surmise from that sentence that a lower
value might cause particular issues, but that you found 10 seconds to be
okay in practice. Fine. But what happens if one caller hits this at
second 9 and the next caller hits it at second 0? In that case, the
interval might have been 1 second, not 10. In other words, if you need
a certain minimum quantization for this to not cause "particular
issues", it might not work the way you wanted it to.

Additionally, that problem aside, if you round EPHEMERAL_PORT_SHUFFLE_PERIOD
to the nearest power of two, you can turn the expensive division into a
bit shift right.

Regards,
Jason