[tor-dev] [Stegotorus] Fundamental problem with ack/retransmission mechanism

[Zack Weinberg]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 5:08 PM,  <vmonmoonshine at gmail.com> wrote:
> Zack Weinberg <zackw at panix.com> writes:
>>and the retransmit of packet 1 ought to be happening on a
>>*different* connection, if we have one.  (Which steg are you using?)
> I'm using nosteg steg. I thought if something is going to work, better, it
> works with the simplest steg. nosteg only open one connection and pass
> everything through it as long as there is no reason to drop it, for bad
> header etc.

OK. We shouldn't even try to retransmit with a 1-connection steg mode
(unless it's not using TCP ... worry about that later)

>> So I'm not understanding exactly what the "dropper proxy" does.  Does
>> it prevent TCP from providing reliable delivery?  If so, how?
> It sits at socket_read_cb and sometimes doesn't copy what libevent's has
> read from one side of communication, into the buffer of the other
> side.

Ah.  Yeah, that's not going to work.  TCP will think that the data
_has_ been delivered, so the lower-level retransmit that we're relying
on will never happen.

> So, what you say, means that libevents socket_read_cb calls are more
> refined than an entire TCP packet that TCP guaranteed to deliver. I.e,
> libevent break something that TCP guaranteed to deliver in smaller
> parts.

TCP is a stream-oriented protocol.  It guarantees to provide reliable,
ordered delivery of a _sequence of bytes_.  It does _not_ guarantee
anything whatsoever about packet boundaries.  In particular, the
amount of data libevent hands you in one read callback is completely
meaningless.

> If this is true, I guess because TCP is giving us a stream there is no
> way for us to know where to drop to have a legitimate simulation of real
> life packet drop in that stream, unless I incorporate part of chop in
> the dropper proxy to read their headers and detect end of packet.

What you need to do is implement the dropping _below_ TCP, so that TCP
is aware of it and does do its retransmits.  You can do this on Linux
with netem
<http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/netem>
and on many of the *BSDs (including OSX) with dummynet
<http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/dummynet/>.

>> ST absolutely *does* need a congestion
>> control mechanism, though, to prevent the entire circuit from getting
>> killed because it overran the fixed-size reassembly queue, and as long
>> as we have to do that ...
>>
> Then maybe I just start an axe timer whenever when I want to send and
> the transmit queue is full and delete the timer whenever the queue
> moves.

How do you know that your peer's receive queue is full, if it doesn't tell you?

But we probably could get away with something much simpler if we don't
bother doing retransmits, e.g. something akin to Tor's SENDME cells.

zw