Re: propagating vmgenid outward and upward

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Tue, Mar 01, 2022 at 07:37:06PM +0100, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> Hi Michael,
> 
> On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 6:17 PM Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hmm okay, so it's a performance optimization... some batching then? Do
> > you really need to worry about every packet? Every 64 packets not
> > enough?  Packets are after all queued at NICs etc, and VM fork can
> > happen after they leave wireguard ...
> 
> Unfortunately, yes, this is an "every packet" sort of thing -- if the
> race is to be avoided in a meaningful way. It's really extra bad:
> ChaCha20 and AES-CTR work by xoring a secret stream of bytes with
> plaintext to produce a ciphertext. If you use that same secret stream
> and xor it with a second plaintext and transmit that too, an attacker
> can combine the two different ciphertexts to learn things about the
> original plaintext.

So what about the point about packets queued then? You don't fish
packets out of qdisc queues, do you?

> But, anyway, it seems like the race is here to stay given what we have
> _currently_ available with the virtual hardware. That's why I'm
> focused on trying to get something going that's the least bad with
> what we've currently got, which is racy by design. How vitally
> important is it to have something that doesn't race in the far future?
> I don't know, really. It seems plausible that that ACPI notifier
> triggers so early that nothing else really even has a chance, so the
> race concern is purely theoretical. But I haven't tried to measure
> that so I'm not sure.
> 
> Jason