From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:06:36 +0000 (+0000)
Subject: Document the nss branch purpose and current issues
X-Git-Url: http://git.ipfire.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?a=commitdiff_plain;h=88fcc9d75f0fb36f7b60d6b3521a62eeaed94d46;p=thirdparty%2Fkrb5.git

Document the nss branch purpose and current issues

git-svn-id: svn://anonsvn.mit.edu/krb5/branches/nss@24249 dc483132-0cff-0310-8789-dd5450dbe970
---

diff --git a/README.BRANCH b/README.BRANCH
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..b5deaf8980
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.BRANCH
@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+This branch contains a libnss back-end implementation for libk5crypto.
+The code was originally checked into branches/krb5-1-8-nss (branched
+from tags/krb5-1-8-final) by Robert Relyea.
+
+Identified issues with this branch include, in roughly decreasing
+order of priority:
+
+* The copyright and license statements on new code are problematic.
+
+* k5_nss_init fails on Ubuntu.  More generally, it makes the
+  assumption that the NSS library should be initialized with
+  "sql:/etc/pki/nssdb" on Linux platforms, which is apparently not a
+  universal convention, and with no DB on other platforms.
+
+* If k5_nss_init fails, the Yarrow code crashes out with a seg fault
+  during library initialization.  This is because the Yarrow interface
+  to the SHA1 hash implementation has no error path (because there are
+  no failure cases in a direct implementation, assuming well-formed
+  input).  The upshot is that HASH_Init() fails silently without
+  initializing the context length field, and HASH_Final() passes the
+  uninitialized length field as an argument to memcpy().
+
+* k5_nss_gen_stream_iov sets state->length to -1 to protect against
+  copying of the state structure by the caller, on the assumption that
+  an app trying to copy the state will gracefully fail to allocate
+  (unsigned int)-1 bytes of memory.  This is an invalid assumption;
+  64-bit platforms can often allocate that much memory.  A better
+  approach is to use a loopback pointer to detect copying, as in
+  lib/crypto/openssl/enc_provider/rc4.c.
+
+* There are several ifdefs which are not documented or supported in
+  configure:
+
+  - NSS_LOOKUP_STRING in hmac.c: This code appears to be
+    non-functional.
+
+  - USE_OPAQUE_KEYS in enc_gen.c (defined by default)
+
+  - FAKE_FIPS in enc_gen.c
+
+  - DO_FAST_XOR in enc_gen.c (defined by default); the affected code
+    should probably be factored out with xorblock() from various
+    places in the built-in back end, into an inline function in a
+    utility header file somewhere.
+
+* The code could perhaps benefit from organizational simplification,
+  such as eliminating the many small files for enc and hash providers
+  (since all of their logic is in enc_gen.c and hash_gen.c anyway).
+
+* k5_ is used as a prefix for private symbols visible to the linker.
+  This may be acceptable as an emerging namespace practice (see the
+  plugins2 branch) but it needs to be validated.