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Need a MIDL like language which specifies messages, and generates skeleton program with key handling and protocol negotiation, in which the distributed public keys are hashes of rules for recognizing valid full asymmetric encryption public keys, which interface with a key distribution and key management system, and which generates skeleton client server programs with full protocol negotiation, DDOS resistance, end to end encryption, support for once and only once messaging, with or without in order messaging support for at least once messaging, with or without in order messaging.
A single endpoint is displayed to the user with a single name, and for all communications and all protocols with an endpoin under all applications that that should conceived of by the particular user a single site with a single name, and for all applications displaying information from that site to a single user, there should be a single encryption and authentication key per session, many channels per protocol, many protocols per session, one key for all - thereby avoiding the security holes that result from the browser recreating keys many times in what is perceived by the user to be single session with a single entity. In the brower, web pages nominally from the same origin can modify web pages secured using a different certificate and a different certificate authority. To avoid the endless security complications that ensue, all connections in a single session should rest on a single shared secret - we should never recreate shared secrets from public keys in the course of a session or a transaction.
The keying mechanism should support secret handshakes, for the core revolutionary problem is the long march through the institutions.
The keying mechanism should also support the corporate form - not sure if anything special needs to be done to support signatures that represent shareholder votes.
The protocol negotiation mechanism should enable anyone to add their own protocol without consulting anyone and without disruption or significant inefficiency ensuing, while guaranteeing that once a connection is set up, both ends are talking the same protocol.
The keying mechanism shall start with a hash type identifier, followed by the hash. The hash is a hash of a rule prescribing a valid key in full binary. Permissible rules are
Whenever one writes a client server program, and whenever one writes multi threaded software on the shared-nothing model, for example python with threads connected by queues, one tends to wind up violating the Don't Repeat Yourself principle, and the Once And Only Once principle, eventually leading to total code meltdown in any very large and very long lived project, so that it eventually becomes impossible to make any further substantial changes to the project that involve changing the interface between client and server, even when it becomes apparent that the architecture contains utterly disastrous failings that are complete show stoppers.
The present browser crisis with https is an example of such an insoluble show stopper, one example of a great many.
Many of the requirements for a generic server program are discussed in Beowulf's retrospective on Qmail. The Unix generic server program is inetd.
A server program has to recover from crashes, and give performance that degrades gracefully in a resource limited situation rather than crashing and burning.
Inetd listens for network connections. When a connection is made, inetd runs another program to handle the connection. For example, inetd can run qmail-smtpd to handle an incoming SMTP connection. The qmail-smtpd program doesn't have to worry about networking, multitasking, etc.; it receives SMTP commands from one client on its standard input, and sends the responses to its standard output.
If a particular instance of qmail-smtpd crashes or hangs, it is not a problem. Each instance does limited processing, stuffs the result into a queue, activates the program that processes the queue if it is not presently running, and shuts down. The queue is processed with limited parallelism, thus is somewhat resistance resource limited crash and burn.
I envisage something much more capable - that instead of specifying an IO stream, one specifies an interface, which gets compiled into message crackers, a skeleton program with protocol negotiation, and unit tests.
In accordance with the Don't Repeat Yourself principle, the specification is human readable, and records the history of changes and variants in the specification. The history of changes and variants is compiled into protocol negotiation code for both sides of the interface, and the specification itself is compiled into message generators and message crackers for both sides of the interface. The generated code is regenerated every major make, and is never checked into source code control, nor edited by humans, though the generated skeleton code may be copied by humans as a starting point.
We use a compiler compiler such as CoCo/R to generate a compiler that compiles the interface specification to the program. An interface specification specifies several interface versions. In the absence of C code, it generates a skeleton program. In the presence of C code for the previous version of the protocol, it adds a skeleton for the new version of the protocol to the existing program. (I favor CoCo, because it can compile itself, though it does not seem a very popular choice.)
This functionality is akin to MIDL. MIDL was a Microsoft compiler that compiled interface description language into C++ code that implemented that interface and interface negotiation - thereby ensuring that everyone used the same methods to find out what interfaces were available, and to advertise what interfaces they made available. MIDL/IDL/COM was designed for calls within a single address space and a single thread, and worked great for this problem, but their efforts to extend it to inter thread, inter process, and across network calls varied from bad to catastrophic.
Google's protobuf is designed to work between threads - it is a message specification protocl, but lacks the key feature of MIDL: Protocol negotiation - no run time guarantee that data was serialized the way it will be deserialized.
We can also use a meta programming system such as Boost, which gives C++ lisp like meta programming capabilities. Unfortunately Boost, though a no doubt excellent language, runs on the virtual machine provided by compilers to implement templates, and the most trivial operations suck up large amounts of stack space and symbol space, so despite the coolness of the language, I expect it to die horribly in real world applications.
We want message crackers, so as to protect against the buffer overflow problem. But what about the resource limit problem?
Launching a new program for every connection is costly, even in Unix, and much more costly for Windows. I envisage that the server program will use the TBB, creating a new thread for each connection. That is efficient, but it means that a failure in one connection can inconvenience all others, that a bug can allow one thread to access information from other threads. For the latter problem, I think the answer is just "no bugs" - or at least no bugs that allow access to random memory, but there is one bug we are bound to have: Resource exhaustion.
How does the generic server program, the program generated for a particular interface specification, handle resource exhaustion?
We need our program to be neutral to DDoS - does not allow anything that is cheap for an anonymous attacker's machine but expensive for the server machine, and we need our program to degrade gracefully when legitimate usage exceeds its capability.
First, when establishing new connections, we have a limited cache for connections in the process of being established. If that cache is exceeded, we send an encrypted cookie to the client, and stop holding state for connections in progress - see the discussion of defenses against a distributed denial of service attack on TCP - syn flooding and TCP cookies.
Our address space for connections is large and variable precision. Each incoming packet contains a clear index to a shared secret, which is used to decrypt the first block in the incoming packet, which has to be correct format and in window for the connection stream, or the packet gets discarded. We now, after the decryption, have the connection stream identifier, which may contain an index to a larger set of shared secrets, a set of connections and streams larger than the in memory list for shared secrets for the initial block.
Having identified that the stream is legit, we then check if the packet of the stream corresponds to a presently running thread of a presently running protocol interpreter. If it is, we dispatch the packet to that program. If it is not, but the protocol interpreter is running, we dispatch the packet, and the protocol interpreter recovers the state from the database and launches a new thread for that stream. Similarly, if the protocol interpreter is not running . . .
Each thread in the protocol interpreter times out after a bit of inactivity, and saves its state to the database. Persistently busy threads time out regardless, to discriminate against needy clients. When no threads remain, the protocol interpreter shuts down. From time to time we launch new instances of the protocol interpreter, (we being the master interpreter that handles all protocols) and failure of the old instance to shut down within a reasonable time is detected and presented as an error.
The master interpreter monitors resource usage, and gracefully declines to open new connections, and shuts down hoggish old connections, when resources get sparse. The skeleton interpreter generated for each protocol has a cache limit and database limit for the number of connections, and an idle and absolute time limit on cache and database connections - when the cache limit is exceeded, the connection information goes to database, when the database limit is exceeded, the connection is terminated.
Internet facing programs will always encounter malicious data. The two huge problems in C and C++ internet facing programs are buffer overflow and malloc failure. It is possible to take care of buffer overflow just by tightly vetting all string inputs. All string inputs have to have a defined format and defined maximum length, and be vetted for conformity. This is doable, problem solved - and the protocol definition should specify restraints on strings, with default restraints if none specified, and the code generated by the protocol interpreter should contain such checks, guaranteeing that all input strings have defined maximums, and defined forbidden or permitted characters. Malloc, however is a harder problem. No one is going to write and test error recovery from every malloc. We therefore have to redefine malloc in the library as malloc_nofail. If someone is going to write error recovery code, he can explicitly call malloc_can_fail. If malloc_no_fail fails, program instance shuts down, thereby relieving resource shortage by degrading service if the malloc failure is caused by server overload, or frustrating the attack if the malloc failure is caused by some clever attack.
We cannot ensure that nothing can ever go wrong, therefore we must have a crash-and-restart process, that detects process failure, and auto relaunches. Unix encourages this code pattern, by providing Inetd. This is perhaps, overly costly, but continually spawning and killing off new processes is inherently robust. Therefore, ever so often, we must spawn a new instance, and every so often, old instances must be destroyed.
The protocol interpreter should automatically generate such a robust architecture - a working skeleton program that is internet facing and architected in ways that make programs derived from it unlikely to fail under attack. The experience with web servers is that the efficient and robust solution is multiple instances, each with multiple threads. For robustness, retire an instance after a while. One thread per client session, new sessions with same client in the same instance where possible (what is a session is sometimes unclear) and after a while, an old instance gets no new threads, and is eventually forcibly shut down, if it does not shut itself down when out of client threads and no prospect of getting new ones.
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