Bug #16148

ICMPv6 leaks detected by test suite

Added by bertagaz 2018-11-23 11:01:49 . Updated 2019-07-03 08:04:22 .

Status:
Resolved
Priority:
Elevated
Assignee:
Category:
Test suite
Target version:
Start date:
2018-11-23
Due date:
% Done:

100%

Feature Branch:
feature/16148-unfiltered-pcaps feature/16148-disable-ipv6 feature/16148-disable-ipv6+force-all-tests
Type of work:
Code
Blueprint:

Starter:
Affected tool:
Deliverable for:

Description

While working on Feature #14596, FirewallAssertionFailedErrors were sometimes throwned by the test suite.

It seems there are some ICMPv6 multicast “neighboor solicitation” and “router solicitation” packets catched by the test suite firewall leak detector. Whether this exceptions are legit or not is unclear. It happens only in the “Revovering in offline mode after…” scenario of the “Additional Software” feature, which is the longest one, and does boots Tails three times.

I’m attaching the logs from Jenkins run 75 which exposes this bug.


Files


Subtasks


Related issues

Related to Tails - Bug #11521: The check_tor_leaks hook is fragile Resolved 2016-06-10
Related to Tails - Bug #16788: Tests fail with "Found something in the pcap file that either is non-IP, or cannot be parsed (RuntimeError)" Resolved
Related to Tails - Bug #16825: "Found something that is not an ethernet packet" intermittent test failure Resolved
Blocks Tails - Feature #16209: Core work: Foundations Team Confirmed

History

#1 Updated by intrigeri 2018-12-03 18:10:18

#2 Updated by nodens 2018-12-03 19:23:53

Hi,

If there is no ipv6 default gateway, it’s expected for the host to send icmpv6 multicast packets for router/neighbor discovery. It is needed in order to reach the Tor network over IPv6, unless DHCPv6 is used - but that’s not often the case outside of corporate network.

If there is also ipv4 connectivity, then of course it’s not mandatory, but we should treat those the same as DHCP requests.
as long as it’s to a multicast address, it won’t be routed to the outside, only replied to by gateways. It might be used as a fingerprinting mean (you can tell it’s from a linux OS), but only locally.

Legit and unavoidable ICMPv6 Type, outgoing from the host, would be:

  • type 133 (Router Sollicitation), to ff02::02 (all router multicast address on link-local) and the default gateway on the “local” network if there is already one.
  • type 135 (Neighbor Sollicitation), to ff02::1:ff00:0/104 (Solicited node multicast address), fe80::/10 (link-local) and the local subnet.
  • type 136 (Neighbor Advertisement), in response to a Neighbor Solicitation message. This is usually handled nicely by a stateful ruleset (i.e. no explicit rule needed, just allowing ESTABLISHED,RELATED, it’s never in NEW state).

There might be others, those are the most used ones and thus the ones I can remember easily. If needed, I can research a bit more to provide a comprehensive list of needed ICMPv6 outgoing packets. Most rulesets I’ve seen allows outgoing ICMPv6 trafic without restriction on the link-local (fe80::/10) prefix and

Althought it’s not a big issue, as it seems really unlikely to have an ipv6 only network nowadays, you never know… I can indeed imagine a situation where ipv4 would be unusable because tor is filtered, while it’d work on ipv6. So we should make sure it’s actually working. :)

Cheers,

#3 Updated by geb 2018-12-04 14:23:39

Hi,

nodens wrote:
>
> [….]
>
> There might be others, those are the most used ones and thus the ones I can remember easily. If needed, I can research a bit more to provide a comprehensive list of needed ICMPv6 outgoing packets. Most rulesets I’ve seen allows outgoing ICMPv6 trafic without restriction on the link-local (fe80::/10) prefix and
>

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4890#section-4.4 :-)

However, it may not be the only topic of this bug. As far as i understand it (please correct me if i am wrong) there are different questions :

- Is this trafic legit ? Yes it, as you said (thanks!) thoses packets are just the equivalent of DHCP and ARP requests/response, so they are fully legit for a given host.

- Is Tails suppose to emit this kind of trafic ? I don’t think so as IPv6 should be filtered by the firewall https://git-tails.immerda.ch/tails/plain/config/chroot_local-includes/etc/ferm/ferm.conf

- Why does Tails emit this traffic ? This is a normal behaviour for an IPv6 enabled host to emit this kind of trafic when an interface goes up (or up/down/up), which this test seems to be design to trigger

- Why this trafic is not filtered ? It may depends how the firewalls rules are applied, for example, if they are per interface (which it seems to be), and the update is trigger with network-manager (https://git-tails.immerda.ch/tails/plain/config/chroot_local-includes/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/00-firewall.sh) it is not fully unexpected that the kernel will send those packets before those the firewall rules being updated

- How to filter those trafic ? Maybe /etc/network/if-pre-up.d will be trigger before the interface guets up. Maybe using sysctl (net.ipv6.conf.*.disable_ipv6), or (in my opinion, the better option) to avoid using per interface iptables rules and thus to configure ferm according if possible, maybe also disabling ipv6 directly from the kernel boot options.
- What would be the practical impact of this bug ? If somebody add a network adapter (after the firewall is firstly configured), it may emit ICMPv6 Network Sollicitation / Neighbor Sollicitation packets. I don’t think there is any practical impact, if no other packet that are supposed to be filtered are emitted in this (really short) timeframe

If needed I will be happy to investigate a bit more, maybe with some clarification how what the test precisely does

#4 Updated by geb 2018-12-05 12:00:26

Hi,

geb wrote:
> - Why this trafic is not filtered ? It may depends how the firewalls rules are applied, for example, if they are per interface (which it seems to be), and the update is trigger with network-manager (https://git-tails.immerda.ch/tails/plain/config/chroot_local-includes/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/00-firewall.sh) it is not fully unexpected that the kernel will send those packets before those the firewall rules being updated
> - How to filter those trafic ? Maybe /etc/network/if-pre-up.d will be trigger before the interface guets up. Maybe using sysctl (net.ipv6.conf.*.disable_ipv6), or (in my opinion, the better option) to avoid using per interface iptables rules and thus to configure ferm according if possible, maybe also disabling ipv6 directly from the kernel boot options.

I was wrong: there is a -A OUTPUT -j REJECT —reject-with icmp6-port-unreachable line, that should reject the trafic on every interface.

Then, my best guest for the fact packets aren’t filtered would maybe be the moment ferm is restarted when an interface goes up (by https://git-tails.immerda.ch/tails/plain/config/chroot_local-includes/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/00-firewall.sh).

I gave a quick look to ferm, it seems to use ip(6)tables-restore ip(6)tables-saves by default, not sure if its atomic or would let interface being unfiltered for a really short while.

And maybe ferm is not the problem ..

#5 Updated by intrigeri 2018-12-10 09:41:33

  • Target version changed from Tails_3.11 to Tails_3.12

#6 Updated by intrigeri 2018-12-30 12:32:50

#7 Updated by intrigeri 2018-12-30 12:33:04

  • blocked by deleted (Feature #15506: Core work 2018Q4: Foundations Team)

#8 Updated by hefee 2019-01-04 15:33:11

  • Assignee set to hefee

#9 Updated by hefee 2019-01-11 16:07:40

  • Assignee changed from hefee to bertagaz
  • QA Check set to Info Needed

So far I can see there are only two packages, that get transmitted by Tails. Others are successfully sopped by ferm.

In the journal you can see entries like this, as we expected them to get dropped:

Nov 21 14:37:49 amnesia kernel: Dropped outbound packet: IN= OUT=eth0 SRC=fe80:0000:0000:0000:5254:00ff:fe42:37d2 DST=ff02:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0002 LEN=56 TC=0 HOPLIMIT=255 FLOWLBL=0 PROTO=ICMPv6 TYPE=133 CODE=0·

Unfortunately the pcap file does only have timedelta as time, so I can’t link the pcap together with the ferm start. Can you give me the timestamp, when the pcap started? Than we should see, when the packages got transmitted and were not catched.

geb, nodens:
I think, we should be able to control the output on all interfaces and not just say, yeah well, this packages sent are not that bad. If Tails starts to support IPv6, we need to enable these packages. But currently Tails is not ready for IPv6, so we should disable everything and also try to catch for those two packages…

#10 Updated by intrigeri 2019-01-11 17:10:36

  • Assignee changed from bertagaz to hefee

> Can you give me the timestamp, when the pcap started? Than we should see, when the packages got transmitted and were not catched.

AFAICT all the artifacts we have are attached to this ticket. I think this info is in the debug log. If it’s not explicit, let me know, I’ll check our test suite code to tell you which debug log line indicates the start of the capture.

(Also, you mean packets, not packages, right? :)

#11 Updated by hefee 2019-01-21 01:28:32

  • Assignee changed from hefee to intrigeri

intrigeri wrote:

> AFAICT all the artifacts we have are attached to this ticket. I think this info is in the debug log. If it’s not explicit, let me know, I’ll check our test suite code to tell you which debug log line indicates the start of the capture.

Sorry my mistake, the pcap has a absolute time but normaly only secs form start are displayed. Than I can match the journal and pcap.

The interesting packets:

15:33:57 - Router Sollicitation
15:33:57 - Neighbor Sollicitation

I can match the pcap with the journal by the dchp-client packets:

15:37:44 - DHCP Request (pcap)
Nov 21 14:37:46 amnesia dhclient[1137]: DHCPREQUEST of 10.2.1.45 on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67

-> We have around 1h 2secs diff between journal and pcap. But the saved journal starts at 14:34:28 UTC. We are interested what was happening at 14:33:55 UTC. So it is maybe a shutdown issue?

Unfortunately the debuglog uses completely different timestamps (sec from start). And tells me, that the test fails at 2:56:48. (It would help, if the timestapms would be UTC too). So if I speculate, that this is the end time of the journal. I see this scenario, that is triggering the packets:

02:52:09.157565101: execution complete
    And I can open the Additional Software configuration window from the notification 
# features/step_definitions/additional_software_packages.rb:136
02:52:09.158840925: spawning as root: poweroff
    And I shutdown Tails and wait for the computer to power off
# features/step_definitions/common_steps.rb:562
02:52:19.485028828: [log] CLICK on L(1023,384)@S(0)[0,0 1024x768]                                  
02:52:22.893751238: [log]  TYPE " autotest_never_use_this_option blacklist=psmouse #ENTER."
02:53:46.493521850: calling as root: echo 'hello?'

That would match to my thought, that the packets are triggered from the previous Tails run and are a shutdown issue.

Can it be, that the tcpdump starts along with the start of the scenario and that reboots do not test the tcpdump, so only the last journal is saved?

#12 Updated by geb 2019-01-21 12:48:20

Hi,

geb wrote:
> I gave a quick look to ferm, it seems to use ip(6)tables-restore ip(6)tables-saves by default, not sure if its atomic or would let interface being unfiltered for a really short while.
>
> And maybe ferm is not the problem ..

I wanted to confirm this intuition. It was wrong. I tested to flood the one interface (ping6 -f ::1) while continiously restarting ferm (while : ; do ferm /etc/ferm.conf; done;) and was not able to see any packet flowing (I activated inbound log to log replies, but no request was received).

Thus sorry for the wrong (and thus offtopic) intuition .

#13 Updated by intrigeri 2019-01-21 13:26:28

  • Assignee changed from intrigeri to anonym

I won’t have time to look into this in time for 3.12, but anonym might have time and could be excited about it. If that does not happen, let’s organize the next steps at the FT meeting.

#14 Updated by anonym 2019-01-29 15:30:08

  • Target version changed from Tails_3.12 to Tails_3.13

#15 Updated by intrigeri 2019-02-06 14:24:46

  • Assignee deleted (anonym)

intrigeri wrote:
> I won’t have time to look into this in time for 3.12, but anonym might have time and could be excited about it. If that does not happen, let’s organize the next steps at the FT meeting.

Did not happen, let’s discuss this at the FT meeting.

#17 Updated by intrigeri 2019-02-16 06:06:30

  • related to Bug #11521: The check_tor_leaks hook is fragile added

#18 Updated by intrigeri 2019-02-16 06:07:50

Anyone who works on this and wants to investigate the “leftover from previous scenario” hypothesis, see Bug #11521 where I’ve made the very same hypothesis a few years ago.

#19 Updated by intrigeri 2019-02-16 06:08:12

  • Category set to Test suite
  • QA Check deleted (Info Needed)

#20 Updated by intrigeri 2019-03-12 14:16:53

  • Target version deleted (Tails_3.13)

#21 Updated by intrigeri 2019-03-12 16:10:50

#22 Updated by intrigeri 2019-03-12 16:10:52

  • blocked by deleted (Feature #15507: Core work 2019Q1: Foundations Team)

#23 Updated by intrigeri 2019-05-19 05:30:02

  • Priority changed from Normal to Elevated

This has caused 3 out of the last 10 test suite runs on the stable branch to fail, which makes me spend an amount of time I can’t justify on analyzing such failures (and I would assume that some other folks on the RMs list do the same) => bumping priority. @anonym, looking for your next FT semi-procrastination task, for when you won’t be busy with Tor Browser 9 matters?

#24 Updated by anonym 2019-06-04 12:40:01

  • Status changed from Confirmed to In Progress
  • Assignee set to anonym
  • Target version set to Tails_3.15
  • % Done changed from 0 to 20
  • Feature Branch set to feature/16150-unfiltered-pcaps feature/16150-disable-ipv6

intrigeri wrote:
> Anyone who works on this and wants to investigate the “leftover from previous scenario” hypothesis, see Bug #11521 where I’ve made the very same hypothesis a few years ago.

Looking at the pcap files we can rule this out: the offending packets are sent in the middle of the scenario, not the beginning which would be implied by your hypothesis.

In test_asp_75_firewallassertionerror.pcap the offending packets are:

MAC source         MAC destination    Info
50:54:00:ad:40:c6  33:33:00:00:00:02  Router Solicitation from 50:54:00:ad:40:c6
50:54:00:ad:40:c6  33:33:ff:ad:40:c6  Neighbor Solicitation for fc00::5254:ff:fead:40c6


and the source indeed is the Tails system (50:54:00:ad:40:c6). It’s unfortunate that we do filtering already when we collect the pcap file, because other packets sent before/after this could perhaps shed some light on what’s going on. I’ve pushed the branch feature/16150-unfiltered-pcaps which collects full pcap files to investigate this further.

Also, since we are not supporting IPv6 and try but fail to block it, why not just completely disable it? I’ve pushed feature/16150-disable-ipv6 for that, and my assumption is that this should completely fix this problem. Any objections to this? Things I haven’t thought about?

Actually, disabling IPv6 should just work around whatever issue we have, but I think that is fine. When/if we add IPv6 support we’ll have think deep about tons of stuff including the Router Solicitation topic, so let’s defer any that work to then.

Any way, my plan with these branches are:

  • Verify that feature/16150-disable-ipv6 fixes these failures
  • See if any run of feature/16150-unfiltered-pcaps gives more clues about the real issue and if so take notes for the future work on adding IPv6 support (but not spend a lot of time on it)
  • Get both branches merged:
    • feature/16150-disable-ipv6 as the fix
    • feature/16150-unfiltered-pcaps for its improved pcap logging (and it’s a nice refactoring, imho)

#25 Updated by anonym 2019-06-04 14:06:36

  • Feature Branch changed from feature/16150-unfiltered-pcaps feature/16150-disable-ipv6 to feature/16148-unfiltered-pcaps feature/16148-disable-ipv6

#26 Updated by anonym 2019-06-04 14:29:57

As you may have noted I screwed up the branch names initially, sorry about that.

Concerns were raised that disabling IPv6 might break services or applications assuming that “localhost is ::1” (or similar) but booting with and without IPv6 produces bit-by-bit identical output from systemctl --all, which feels reassuring. This of course says nothing about user applications, but the automated test suite will hopefully help with that.

#27 Updated by anonym 2019-06-04 18:04:40

  • Feature Branch changed from feature/16148-unfiltered-pcaps feature/16148-disable-ipv6 to feature/16148-unfiltered-pcaps feature/16148-disable-ipv6 feature/16148-disable-ipv6+force-all-tests

#28 Updated by anonym 2019-06-05 08:31:40

  • Status changed from In Progress to Needs Validation
  • Assignee deleted (anonym)
  • % Done changed from 20 to 50

We have test results:

  • feature/16148-unfiltered-pcaps: the scenario still fails, as expected. The full pcap shows that after Tails sends a Router Solicitation, then the router sends a Router Advertisement (then Tails sends the Neighbor Solicitation). So this confirms what nodens said in Bug #16148#note-2: “If there is no ipv6 default gateway, it’s expected for the host to send icmpv6 multicast packets for router/neighbor discovery”. So we are at least not responding to an advertisment initiated by the router, which is good.
    I’m still convinced that disabling IPv6 is the proper solution for us now. The alternative is to find a way to just disable sending Router Solicitations (net.ipv6.conf.all.accept_ra=0 perhaps does that?) or make an exception for it in our filter (like we do for DHCP) but I don’t see any reason to keep this attack surface.

IMHO these branches are ready to be merged!

#29 Updated by hefee 2019-06-05 09:37:14

  • Assignee set to hefee

#30 Updated by hefee 2019-06-05 10:04:30

  • Assignee changed from hefee to anonym

anonym wrote:
> We have test results:
>
> * feature/16148-unfiltered-pcaps: the scenario still fails, as expected. The full pcap shows that after Tails sends a Router Solicitation, then the router sends a Router Advertisement (then Tails sends the Neighbor Solicitation). So this confirms what nodens said in Bug #16148#note-2: “If there is no ipv6 default gateway, it’s expected for the host to send icmpv6 multicast packets for router/neighbor discovery”. So we are at least not responding to an advertisment initiated by the router, which is good.
> I’m still convinced that disabling IPv6 is the proper solution for us now. The alternative is to find a way to just disable sending Router Solicitations (net.ipv6.conf.all.accept_ra=0 perhaps does that?) or make an exception for it in our filter (like we do for DHCP) but I don’t see any reason to keep this attack surface.

disabling IPv6 completely is consequent and I like this step. As we than can enable Ipv6, when we are ready for it. What we loose when we disable IPv6 is that there may be setups that have IPv6 only in the local network and use Ip4 mapping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped%20IPv6%20addresses).

> * feature/16148-disable-ipv6 (and another run: all scenarios passed, including this one, so disabling IPv6 would indeed solve our problem.

seems fine.

> * feature/16148-disable-ipv6+force-all-tests: two unrelated failures, yay!

seems fine.

> IMHO these branches are ready to be merged!

review passed. As I don’t have permission to merge, so you have to merge yourself.

#31 Updated by anonym 2019-06-05 21:21:14

Actually I just remember that nodens suggested to disable by adding disable_ipv6=1 to the kernel command-line instead. Our current approach (sysctl during boot) actually creates a window during early boot where IPv6 is enabled. Since we block all network modules until after logging in via Tails Greeter, IPv6 will only be enabled for the loopback interface, so this is perhaps a bit pedantic. We’ll see what I feel tomorrow! (Your thoughts are also welcome, @hefee!)

#32 Updated by hefee 2019-06-06 09:06:56

anonym wrote:
> Actually I just remember that nodens suggested to disable by adding disable_ipv6=1 to the kernel command-line instead. Our current approach (sysctl during boot) actually creates a window during early boot where IPv6 is enabled. Since we block all network modules until after logging in via Tails Greeter, IPv6 will only be enabled for the loopback interface, so this is perhaps a bit pedantic. We’ll see what I feel tomorrow! (Your thoughts are also welcome, hefee!)

Good thughts, but IMO this is irrelevant. sysctl should be triggered much earlier than any network traffic is going over the wire. sysctl.conf is read by systemd-sysctl.service that is triggered within sysinit.target. And only after this the other targets like network.target are started. That’s why I think your approach is safe, that we do not leave any ipv6 packet.
What I read is that we may need ipv6 enabled for loopback, as some programs except loopback with ipv6 capabilities.

net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 0

But if we do not see issues, keep it simple and don’t add this line. But this may also been solved if we remove the line ::1 localhost is in the /etc/hosts.

Keep in mind I haven’t checked on a live Tails - I simply checked my local Debian, so some details may be different.

#33 Updated by anonym 2019-06-06 10:10:28

  • Assignee deleted (anonym)

hefee wrote:
> anonym wrote:
> > Actually I just remember that nodens suggested to disable by adding disable_ipv6=1 to the kernel command-line instead. Our current approach (sysctl during boot) actually creates a window during early boot where IPv6 is enabled. Since we block all network modules until after logging in via Tails Greeter, IPv6 will only be enabled for the loopback interface, so this is perhaps a bit pedantic. We’ll see what I feel tomorrow! (Your thoughts are also welcome, hefee!)
>
> Good thughts, but IMO this is irrelevant. sysctl should be triggered much earlier than any network traffic is going over the wire. sysctl.conf is read by systemd-sysctl.service that is triggered within sysinit.target. And only after this the other targets like network.target are started. That’s why I think your approach is safe, that we do not leave any ipv6 packet.

Makes sense to me!

> What I read is that we may need ipv6 enabled for loopback, as some programs except loopback with ipv6 capabilities.
> […]

Our test test results indicate that nothing broke due to this, but I still think it makes sense (it could save front desk from some hard-to-debug issues from users installing such programs) so I’ll add it.

> But if we do not see issues, keep it simple and don’t add this line. But this may also been solved if we remove the line ::1 localhost is in the /etc/hosts.

Our hosts file is already IPv4 only.

#34 Updated by anonym 2019-06-06 11:38:29

  • Status changed from Needs Validation to In Progress

Applied in changeset commit:tails|24b2dd805e63019d945b9d204e49ee5f3ea521c9.

#35 Updated by anonym 2019-06-06 11:38:30

  • Status changed from In Progress to Fix committed
  • % Done changed from 50 to 100

Applied in changeset commit:tails|744501f6d33001bff8de84e7aa42d1609ea687c6.

#36 Updated by intrigeri 2019-06-07 10:04:38

>> What I read is that we may need ipv6 enabled for loopback, as some programs except loopback with ipv6 capabilities.
>> […]

> Our test test results indicate that nothing broke due to this, but I still think it makes sense (it could save front desk from some hard-to-debug issues from users installing such programs) so I’ll add it.

Agreed.

@anonym, at some point, we had to allow some IPv6 communication on loopback for accessibility matters, see e.g. commit:d625c15c2572cad5b972854dd02a439cb4b4e13b and Feature #11430. That’s perhaps because we did not disable IPv6 entirely though. Still, can someone confirm that Orca and the On-Screen Keyboard still work, both in the Greeter and in the amnesia GNOME session, after this branch was merged?

#37 Updated by intrigeri 2019-06-07 10:58:57

  • related to Bug #16788: Tests fail with "Found something in the pcap file that either is non-IP, or cannot be parsed (RuntimeError)" added

#38 Updated by anonym 2019-06-11 11:51:07

  • Status changed from Fix committed to In Progress

Applied in changeset commit:tails|86bd6d5db9284e6204192dae2f7cae1ddaf20df2.

#39 Updated by anonym 2019-06-11 13:06:06

  • Status changed from In Progress to Fix committed

#40 Updated by anonym 2019-06-11 15:10:08

intrigeri wrote:
> anonym, at some point, we had to allow some IPv6 communication on loopback for accessibility matters, see e.g. commit:d625c15c2572cad5b972854dd02a439cb4b4e13b and Feature #11430. That’s perhaps because we did not disable IPv6 entirely though. Still, can someone confirm that Orca and the On-Screen Keyboard still work, both in the Greeter and in the amnesia GNOME session, after this branch was merged?

All verified.

#41 Updated by intrigeri 2019-06-19 07:58:39

  • related to Bug #16825: "Found something that is not an ethernet packet" intermittent test failure added

#42 Updated by intrigeri 2019-07-03 08:04:22

  • Status changed from Fix committed to Resolved
  • Target version changed from Tails_3.15 to Tails_3.14.1

Fixed in 3.14.1.