WebSockets: add opt-in delegation of encryption to TLS

[achingbrain]

Rewords the Encryption section to allow for opt-in single encryption signalled via a noise extension.

[SgtPooki]

I could easily be missing stuff more libp2p-ish folks will see, but it makes sense to me

[2color]

So despite noise being negotiated as the encryption protocol, no encryption is done at the libp2p level, because of the handshake_only which overrules it?

[achingbrain]

That's correct. Noise does a handshake and encryption, and here we only want the handshake since encryption is done by TLS at the transport layer. This is similar to how the WebTransport and WebRTC transports work.

We still negotiate a connection encryption protocol for backwards compatibility and to allow for alternatives to noise in the future.

[Stebalien]

See #564

[Stebalien]

This doesn't work unless the server somehow includes their domain name in their noise handshake. Otherwise, an attacker can simply announce that some peer id QmVictim is available at /dns/attacker.com/....

Furthermore, by including the domain name in the noise handshake, the server is opting-in to trusting the CA system.

[MarcoPolo]

Note that this also doesn't work unless the server trusts all owners of the given domain name. If the server operator is the sole owner of the domain name, this is fine. But if another party controls the domain name as well, but not the private key to the peer ID, they would be able to MITM/intercept this connection.

[achingbrain]

Good points both.

This doesn't work unless the server somehow includes their domain name in their noise handshake

I've added a further tls_common_name extension to the noise handshake to prevent an attacker publishing an address with a bogus domain and then simply relaying the handshake.

by including the domain name in the noise handshake, the server is opting-in to trusting the CA system

I've added a note to this effect.

Note that this also doesn't work unless the server trusts all owners of the given domain name

I've copied the Security Considerations section from #564 as it seems like they have the same problems with third party root certificates installed on the machine.

Do you think this covers it?

[Stebalien]

Can we make this less specific to websocket/TLS? E.g., one way to do this is to:

1. Setup a noise stream.
2. Over the noise stream, send the TLS common name, etc.
3. Close the noise stream but leave the connection open.
4. Use the connection without encryption.

To support a better upgrade path, this method can be advertised as a new "stream muxer" (more like a "next protocol"). I.e.:

1. Initiator negotiates the "/drop-noise" protocol (or something like that) along with the expected TLS common name (or nothing?).
2. Receiver returns their TLS common name and terminates their end of the noise stream.
3. Client terminates their end of the noise stream.

[achingbrain]

This seems like it would add quite a lot of round trips? Part of the joy of the extensions is they arrive as part of the handshake message.

I know connection establishment with WebSockets has a bunch of round trips already but is this a reason to make it slower, particularly when we already have WebTransport-specific stuff in the extensions registry?

[Stebalien]

Hm. You're right, this'll add a round trip.

[MarcoPolo]

I think we should add a section saying the server MUST complete the handshake before reading or sending any application data. I’m afraid it might be a little too subtle that if the server drops the noise handshake after replying, it has failed to authenticate the client.

Also, just to check my understanding, how many round trips is this before we have a usable WSS connection?

[MarcoPolo]

I’d include a sentence that mentions Keying Material Exporters (RFC 5705), which, in a perfect world, would be the preferred solution.

[achingbrain]

I've added a sentence - please suggest an edit if you think it needs more exposition.

[marten-seemann]

This seems like a new feature to me. As far as I can tell, this isn't implemented anywhere yet. Why does the PR title say it's a fix?

I'm also not convinced that this is a problem worth solving. Sure, double encryption sucks, on paper. And maybe in a synthetic benchmark. But WebSocket connections are relatively rare, and there's a better solution around that solves this and many other problems: WebTransport.

[achingbrain]

@MarcoPolo

I think we should add a section saying the server MUST complete the handshake before reading or sending any application data

I've added this - please suggest an edit if you think it can be clearer.

how many round trips is this before we have a usable WSS connection?

..a few. You need to establish TLS, open a HTTP connection then upgrade it to WS. I think the actual number depends on support for things like TLS1.3 0-RTT, etc.

@marten-seemann

WebSocket connections are relatively rare

Right now, yes, but this will hopefully change with the introduction of Let's Encrypt certs for libp2p WebSocket listeners which will let us enable the the transport by default since historically the need to obtain and set up a cert was the blocker to it being usable.

there's a better solution... WebTransport

All things being equal WebTransport is a better solution, agreed, and will make a lot of this obsolete. However we're not quite there yet - support is not universal and implementations are still quite buggy.

The WebSocket API has the advantage of being supported everywhere, including mobile browsers which means you don't have to muck around with native WebRTC modules for things like react-native which results in better DX.

Not doing unnecessary encryption also means less CPU and battery usage which is very important for mobile so I think this is a problem worth solving.

[marten-seemann]

I don't have a dog in this fight anymore 🤷‍♂️, but here are my 2c. Will probably disengage from the discussion after this post.

I think the actual number depends on support for things like TLS1.3 0-RTT, etc.

WebSocket upgrade requests are not idempotent, and thus not permissible in 0-RTT.

Not doing unnecessary encryption also means less CPU and battery usage which is very important for mobile so I think this is a problem worth solving.

If you're on a mobile device and you're worried about CPU usage, you don't open dozens of WebSocket connections (or WebTransport, for that matter). Instead you do plain old and boring HTTPS, and ideally let the OS handle your connection pool.

Not doing unnecessary encryption also means less CPU and battery usage which is very important for mobile so I think this is a problem worth solving.

What I was asking for in my previous comment was actual real world data. Of course it's slower to encrypt twice (duh!), but how much does it actually matter? Modern CPUs are pretty fast when doing crypto, to the point where optimized QUIC stacks do multiple Gbit/s per CPU core (and that includes TLS, header / frame parsing, UDP syscalls and all the other QUIC logic).

Now you can argue that not all stacks will be that optimized (true!) and that doing crypto in the browser is slower than doing it in C / Assembly (also true!), but then you're also limited to a few dozens connections and you're probably not trying to achieve sustained Gbit/s throughput in your browser application anyway.

[MarcoPolo]

I'm suggesting a change in #564 that would allow clients to initiate the mutual authentication. That would mean that HTTP Peer ID authentication would have the same number of round trips as this change. In that case, I'd prefer if we use HTTP Peer ID authentication to authenticate the WebSocket endpoint instead of this change.

A couple of reasons why:

1. It fits neatly into the WebSocket standard by using HTTP Authentication.
2. It happens before we establish a WebSocket connection. Which is useful because:
   a. Allows offloading authentication to a generic HTTP server.
   b. In the case you want to allow only some Peer IDs to establish a connection you can do that before allocating resources for a full duplex WebSocket.
3. It allows clients and servers to use a bearer token to authenticate future connections.
   a. Important in the browser use case, where we may want to aggressively prune connections.
   b. Saves one round trip in connection establishment for future connections.
4. Allows implementations to avoid a Noise dependency.
   a. We are relying on TLS to provide encryption. It seems silly to have a Noise dependency just for this handshake.
5. Fewer equivalent ways to do the same thing. As far as I can tell, this has the same properties as HTTP Peer ID authentication, so there are no benefits specific to this change.

[achingbrain]

This scheme looks better, I agree. I like that it saves round trips and leverages plain-old-HTTP, however I'm not sure you can implement it using the browser WebSocket API as specified.

The WebSocket constructor takes only two arguments:

new WebSocket(url, protocols)

url is a URL (unsurprisingly), protocols is an optional string or Array<string> which result in a single Sec-WebSocket-Protocol header being set (with comma-delimited values if an array is passed - so protocols can't have a comma in them).

You cannot send custom headers when creating a WebSocket connection, and you cannot access any part of the flow before the upgrade to the WebSocket protocol is complete.

So we could (ab)use the protocols field to send authentication information in the Sec-WebSocket-Protocol header but I don't know if that's better or worse than mandating a noise dependency, which you'd have to have in your app anyway for backwards compatibility. Plus you can't read the response unless it's sent as a WebSocket message event after the protocol upgrade has completed so you've already allocated the resources at that point.

This is a good thread, including why URL params, cookies, HTTP auth, bearer tokens, etc are either unfeasible, insecure or don't work everywhere.

The one thing in all this, I guess, is that it will all be deprecated once WebTransport becomes viable.

[MarcoPolo]

Some interesting history around supporting the "Authorization" header in WebSocket at the WHATWG: whatwg/websockets#16

[MarcoPolo]

You cannot send custom headers when creating a WebSocket connection, and you cannot access any part of the flow before the upgrade to the WebSocket protocol is complete.

That's a shame. With that in mind, this change makes sense to me.

Now you can argue that not all stacks will be that optimized (true!) and that doing crypto in the browser is slower than doing it in C / Assembly (also true!), but then you're also limited to a few dozens connections and you're probably not trying to achieve sustained Gbit/s throughput in your browser application anyway.

My guess is that relying on the browser's TLS stack will make this all ~2-5x more efficient compared to the Noise JS implementation. This guess is informed by my noise-wasm package for js-libp2p which saw ~4x improvement compared to the JS version.

Avoiding double encryption here probably also allows the same server to handle more requests. Probably not 2x the number of requests, but a safe bet would be that it is more than 1x.

Another nice property of this is that it allows for securely connecting (via the Web PKI) to a peer without having to know that peer's peer id ahead of time.

[sukunrt]

You cannot send custom headers when creating a WebSocket connection, and you cannot access any part of the flow before the upgrade to the WebSocket protocol is complete.

Can we do this using http over libp2p(on the websocket connection)?

[MarcoPolo]

Can we do this using http over libp2p(on the websocket connection)?

Yes, but this would add at least 1 RT.

[p-shahi]

nit: update revision to r6, 2024-09-10