Using the tinc command, an administrator of an existing VPN can generate
invitations for new nodes. The invitation is a small URL that can easily
be copy&pasted into email or live chat. Another person can have tinc
automatically setup the necessary configuration files and exchange keys
with the server, by only using the invitation URL.
The invitation protocol uses temporary ECDSA keys. The invitation URL
consists of the hostname and port of the server, a hash of the server's
temporary ECDSA key and a cookie. When the client wants to accept an
invitation, it also creates a temporary ECDSA key, connects to the server
and says it wants to accept an invitation. Both sides exchange their
temporary keys. The client verifies that the server's key matches the hash
in the invitation URL. After setting up an SPTPS connection using the
temporary keys, the client gives the cookie to the server. If the cookie
is valid, the server sends the client an invitation file containing the
client's new name and a copy of the server's host config file. If everything
is ok, the client will generate a long-term ECDSA key and send it to the
server, which will add it to a new host config file for the client.
The invitation protocol currently allows multiple host config files to be
send from the server to the client. However, the client filters out
most configuration variables for its own host configuration file. In
particular, it only accepts Name, Mode, Broadcast, ConnectTo, Subnet and
AutoConnect. Also, at the moment no tinc-up script is generated.
When an invitation has succesfully been accepted, the client needs to start
the tinc daemon manually.
This gets rid of the rest of the symbolic links. However, as a consequence, the
crypto header files have now moved to src/, and can no longer contain
library-specific declarations. Therefore, cipher_t, digest_t, ecdh_t, ecdsa_t
and rsa_t are now all opaque types, and only pointers to those types can be
used.
There are several reasons for this:
- MacOS/X doesn't support polling the tap device using kqueue, requiring a
workaround to fall back to select().
- On Windows only sockets are properly handled, therefore tinc uses a second
thread that does a blocking ReadFile() on the TAP-Win32/64 device. However,
this does not mix well with libevent.
- Libevent, event just the core, is quite large, and although it is easy to get
and install on many platforms, it can be a burden.
- Libev is more lightweight and seems technically superior, but it doesn't
abstract away all the platform differences (for example, async events are not
supported on Windows).
The tree functions were never used on the connection_tree, a list is more appropriate.
Also be more paranoid about connections disappearing while traversing the list.
Struct outgoing_ts and connection_ts were depending too much on each other,
causing lots of problems, especially the reuse of a connection_t. Now, whenever
a connection is closed it is immediately removed from the list of connections
and destroyed.
Most fields should be zero when reusing a connection. In particular, when an
outgoing connection to a node which is reachable on more than one address is
made, the second connection to that node will have status.encryptout set but
outctx will be NULL, causing a NULL pointer dereference when
EVP_EncryptUpdate() is called in send_meta() when it shouldn't.
When making outgoing connections, tinc goes through the list of Addresses and
tries all of them until one succeeds. However, before it would consider
establishing a TCP connection a success, even when the authentication failed.
This would be a problem if the first Address would point to a hostname and port
combination that belongs to the wrong tinc node, or perhaps even to a non-tinc
service, causing tinc to endlessly try this Address instead of moving to the
next one.
Problem found by Delf Eldkraft.
This allows tincctl to receive log messages from a running tincd,
independent of what is logged to syslog or to file. Tincctl can receive
debug messages with an arbitrary level.
The control socket code was completely different from how meta connections are
handled, resulting in lots of extra code to handle requests. Also, not every
operating system has UNIX sockets, so we have to resort to another type of
sockets or pipes for those anyway. To reduce code duplication and make control
sockets work the same on all platforms, we now just connect to the TCP port
where tincd is already listening on.
To authenticate, the program that wants to control a running tinc daemon must
send the contents of a cookie file. The cookie is a random 256 bits number that
is regenerated every time tincd starts. The cookie file should only be readable
by the same user that can start a tincd.
Instead of the binary-ish protocol previously used, we now use an ASCII
protocol similar to that of the meta connections, but this can still change.
Options should have a fixed width anyway, but this also fixes a possible MinGW
compiler bug where %lx tries to print a 64 bit value, even though a long int is
only 32 bits.
- Update year numbers in copyright headers.
- Add copyright information for Michael Tokarev and Florian Forster to the
copyright headers of files to which they have contributed significantly.
- Mention Michael and Florian in AUTHORS.
- Mention that tinc is GPLv3 or later if compiled with the --enable-tunemu
flag.
(The new code is still segfaulting for me, and I'd like to proceed with other
work.)
This largely rolls back to the revision 1545 state of the existing code
(new crypto layer is still there with no callers), though I reintroduced
the segfault fix of revision 1562.
