[PATCH 10/13] util: hash: Reimplement virHashTable using GHashTable

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 10:53:12AM +0100, Peter Krempa wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 16:08:34 +0000, Daniel Berrange wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 04:45:50PM +0100, Peter Krempa wrote:
> > > Glib's hash table provides basically the same functionality as our hash
> > > table.
> > > 
> > > In most cases the only thing that remains in the virHash* wrappers is
> > > NULL-checks of '@table' argument as glib's hash functions don't tolerate
> > > NULL.
> > > 
> > > In case of iterators, we adapt the existing API of iterators to glibs to
> > > prevent having rewrite all callers at this point.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Peter Krempa <pkrempa at redhat.com>
> > > ---
> > >  src/libvirt_private.syms |   4 -
> > >  src/util/meson.build     |   1 -
> > >  src/util/virhash.c       | 416 ++++++++++-----------------------------
> > >  src/util/virhash.h       |   4 +-
> > >  src/util/virhashcode.c   | 125 ------------
> > >  src/util/virhashcode.h   |  33 ----
> > 
> > Our hash code impl uses Murmurhash which makes some efforts to be
> > robust against malicious inputs triggering collisons, notably using
> > a random seed.
> > 
> > The new code uses  g_str_hash which is much weaker, and the API
> > docs explicitly recommend against using it if the input can be from
> > an untrusted user.
> 
> Yes, I've noticed that, but didn't consider it to be that much of a
> problem as any untrusted input which is stored in a hash table (so that
> the attacker can use crafted keys) must be in the first place
> safeguarded against OOM condition by limiting the input count/size.

The problem isn't OOM, rather it is algorithmic complexity. With malicious
hash collisions the runtime lookup performance degrades to O(n) which can
cause scalability concerns in some cases.

Regards,
Daniel
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