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firefox: Add patch to fix AES GCM IV bit size #87708

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merged 1 commit into from
May 13, 2020

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aszlig
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@aszlig aszlig commented May 13, 2020

Regression introduced by bce5268.

The bit size of the initialisation vector for AES GCM has been introduced in NSS version 3.52 in the CK_GCM_PARMS struct via the ulIvBits field.

Unfortunately, Firefox 68.8.0 and 76.0 do not set this field and thus it gets initialised to zero, which in turn causes IV generation to fail.

I found out about this because WebRTC stopped working after updating to NSS 3.52 and so I started bisecting.

Since there wasn't an obvious error in Firefox hinting towards NSS but instead just the video stream ended up as a "null" stream, I didn't suspect the NSS update to be the culprit at first. So I verified a few times and then also started bisecting the actual commit in NSS that
caused the issue.

This turned out to be the problematic change:

https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D63241

One notable change was caused by an inconsistancy between the spec and the released headers in PKCS#11 v2.40. CK_GCM_PARAMS had an extra field in the header that was not in the spec. OASIS considers the header file to be normative, so PKCS#11 v3.0 resolved the issue in favour of the header file definition.

Since the test I've used was a bit flaky, I still didn't believe the result of the bisect to be accurate, but after running the test several times leading same results I dug through the above change line by line to get more clues.

It fortunately didn't take that long to stumble upon the ulIvBits change (which is actually documented in the NSS 3.52 release notes, but I managed to blatantly ignore it for some reason) and started checking the Firefox source tree for changes regarding that field.

Initialisation of that new field has been introduced in preparation for the 76 release, but subsequently got reverted prior to the release, because Firefox 76 is expected to be shipped with NSS 3.51, which didn't have the ulIvBits field.

The patch I'm adding here is just a reintroduction of that change, because we're using NSS 3.52. Not initialising that field will break WebRTC and WebCrypto, which I think the former seems to gain in
popularity these days ;-)

Tested the change against the mentioned VM test and also by testing manually using Jitsi Meet and Nextcloud Talk.

@aszlig aszlig requested review from andir and edolstra May 13, 2020 00:20
Regression introduced by bce5268.

The bit size of the initialisation vector for AES GCM has been
introduced in NSS version 3.52 in the CK_GCM_PARMS struct via the
ulIvBits field.

Unfortunately, Firefox 68.8.0 and 76.0 do not set this field and thus it
gets initialised to zero, which in turn causes IV generation to fail.

I found out about this because WebRTC stopped working after updating to
NSS 3.52 and so I started bisecting.

Since there wasn't an obvious error in Firefox hinting towards NSS but
instead just the video stream ended up as a "null" stream, I didn't
suspect the NSS update to be the culprit at first. So I verified a few
times and then also started bisecting the actual commit in NSS that
caused the issue.

This turned out to be the problematic change:

https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D63241

> One notable change was caused by an inconsistancy between the spec and
> the released headers in PKCS#11 v2.40. CK_GCM_PARAMS had an extra
> field in the header that was not in the spec. OASIS considers the
> header file to be normative, so PKCS#11 v3.0 resolved the issue in
> favor of the header file definition.

Since the test I've used[1] was a bit flaky, I still didn't believe the
result of the bisect to be accurate, but after running the test several
times leading same results I dug through the above change line by line
to get more clues.

It fortunately didn't take that long to stumble upon the ulIvBits change
(which is actually documented in the NSS 3.52 release notes[4], but I
managed to blatantly ignore it for some reason) and started checking the
Firefox source tree for changes regarding that field.

Initialisation of that new field has been introduced[2] in preparation
for the 76 release, but subsequently got reverted[3] prior to the
release, because Firefox 76 is expected to be shipped with NSS 3.51,
which didn't have the ulIvBits field.

The patch I'm adding here is just a reintroduction of that change,
because we're using NSS 3.52. Not initialising that field will break
WebRTC and WebCrypto, which I think the former seems to gain in
popularity these days ;-)

Tested the change against the mentioned VM test[1] and also by testing
manually using Jitsi Meet and Nextcloud Talk.

[1]: https://github.com/aszlig/avonc/tree/884315838b6f0ebb32b/tests/talk
[2]: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3ed30e6b6de1
[3]: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/665137da70ee
[4]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/NSS/NSS_3.52_release_notes

Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@nix.build>
@vcunat vcunat added the 9.needs: port to stable A PR needs a backport to the stable release. label May 13, 2020
@andir andir self-assigned this May 13, 2020
@andir andir merged commit 8ba41a1 into NixOS:master May 13, 2020
@andir
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andir commented May 13, 2020

Thank you very much! I noticed something was off yesterday but haven't had a chance to look into it yet. This change did indeed fix it. I'll work on backporting it next.

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3 participants