Aurich Lawson (after KC Inexperienced)
At first look, Matthew Macy appeared like a superbly affordable option to port WireGuard into the FreeBSD kernel. WireGuard is an encrypted point-to-point tunneling protocol, a part of what most individuals consider as a “VPN.” FreeBSD is a Unix-like working system that powers every thing from Cisco and Juniper routers to Netflix’s community stack, and Macy had loads of expertise on its dev crew, together with work on a number of community drivers.
So when Jim Thompson, the CEO of Netgate, which makes FreeBSD-powered routers, determined it was time for FreeBSD to get pleasure from the identical degree of in-kernel WireGuard help that Linux does, he reached out to supply Macy a contract. Macy would port WireGuard into the FreeBSD kernel, the place Netgate might then use it within the firm’s fashionable pfSense router distribution. The contract was provided with out deadlines or milestones; Macy was merely to get the job carried out on his personal schedule.
With Macy’s degree of expertise—with kernel coding and community stacks particularly—the challenge regarded like a slam dunk. However issues went awry nearly instantly. WireGuard founding developer Jason Donenfeld did not hear in regards to the challenge till it surfaced on a FreeBSD mailing record, and Macy did not appear all for Donenfeld’s help when provided. After roughly 9 months of part-time improvement, Macy dedicated his port—largely unreviewed and inadequately examined—straight into the HEAD part of FreeBSD’s code repository, the place it was scheduled for incorporation into FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE.
This surprising commit raised the stakes for Donenfeld, whose challenge would finally be judged on the standard of any manufacturing launch below the WireGuard title. Donenfeld recognized quite a few issues with Macy’s code, however fairly than object to the port’s launch, Donenfeld determined to repair the problems. He collaborated with FreeBSD developer Kyle Evans and with Matt Dunwoodie, an OpenBSD developer who had labored on WireGuard for that working system. The three changed nearly all of Macy’s code in a mad week-long dash.
This went over very poorly with Netgate, which sponsored Macy’s work. Netgate had already taken Macy’s beta code from a FreeBSD 13 launch candidate and positioned it into manufacturing in pfSense’s 2.5.0 launch. The forklift improve carried out by Donenfeld and collaborators—together with Donenfeld’s sharp characterization of Macy’s code—offered the corporate with a critical PR drawback.
Netgate’s public response included accusations of “irrational bias towards mmacy and Netgate” and irresponsible disclosure of “quite a lot of zero-day exploits”—regardless of Netgate’s near-simultaneous declaration that no precise vulnerabilities existed.
This combative response from Netgate raised elevated scrutiny from many sources, which uncovered shocking components of Macy’s personal previous. He and his spouse Nicole had been arrested in 2008 after two years spent making an attempt to illegally evict tenants from a small San Francisco condo constructing the pair had purchased.
The Macys’ makes an attempt to drive their tenants out included sawing via ground help joists to make the constructing unfit for human habitation, sawing holes straight via the flooring of tenants’ flats, and forging extraordinarily threatening emails showing to be from the tenants themselves. The couple fled to Italy to keep away from prosecution however have been ultimately extradited again to the US—the place they pled responsible to a decreased set of felonies and served 4 years and 4 months every.
Macy’s historical past as a landlord, unsurprisingly, dogged him professionally—which contributed to his personal lack of consideration to the doomed WireGuard port.
“I did not even need to do that work,” Macy ultimately informed us. “I used to be burned out, spent many months with post-COVID syndrome… I would suffered via years of verbal abuse from non-doers and semi-non-doers within the challenge whose one huge one up on me is that they are not felons. I jumped on the alternative to depart the challenge in December… I simply felt an ethical obligation to get [the WireGuard port] over the end line. So you may must forgive me if my last efforts have been a bit half-hearted.”
This admission solutions why such an skilled, certified developer would possibly produce inferior code—nevertheless it raises a lot bigger questions on course of and process inside the FreeBSD core committee itself.
How did a lot sub-par code make it up to now into a significant open supply working system? The place was the code assessment which ought to have stopped it? And why did each the FreeBSD core crew and Netgate appear extra centered on the truth that the code was being disparaged than its precise high quality?
Code High quality
The primary subject is whether or not Macy’s code truly had vital issues. Donenfeld mentioned that it did, and he recognized quite a lot of main points:
- Sleep to mitigate race situations
- Validation capabilities which merely return true
- Catastrophic cryptographic vulnerabilities
- Items of the wg protocol left unimplemented
- Kernel panics
- Safety bypasses
- Printf statements deep in crypto code
- “Spectacular” buffer overflows
- Mazes of Linux→FreeBSD ifdefs
However Netgate argued that Donenfeld had gone overboard along with his adverse evaluation. The unique Macy code, they argued, was merely not that unhealthy.
Regardless of not having any kernel builders on-staff, Ars was capable of confirm not less than a few of Donenfeld’s claims straight, rapidly, and with out exterior help. As an illustration, discovering a validation operate which merely returned true—and printf statements buried deep in cryptographic loops—required nothing extra sophisticated than grep.
Empty validation operate
With a view to verify or deny the declare of an empty validation operate—one which at all times “returns true” fairly than truly validating the info handed to it—we looked for situations of return true or return (true) in Macy’s if_wg code, as checked into FreeBSD 13.0-HEAD.
root@banshee:~/macy-freebsd-wg/sys/dev/if_wg# grep -ir 'return.*true' . | wc -l
21It is a sufficiently small variety of returns to simply hand-audit, so we then used grep to search out the identical knowledge however with three strains of code coming instantly earlier than and after every return true:
root@banshee:~/macy-freebsd-wg/sys/dev/if_wg# grep -ir -A3 -B3 'return.*true' .Among the many legitimate makes use of of return true, we found one empty validation operate, in module/module.c:
wg_allowedip_valid(const struct wg_allowedip *wip)
{
return (true);
}It is most likely value mentioning that this empty validation operate just isn’t buried on the backside of a sprawling mass of code—module.c as written is barely 863 whole strains of code.
We didn’t try to chase down using this operate any additional, nevertheless it seems to be supposed to examine whether or not a packet’s supply and/or vacation spot belongs to WireGuard’s allowed-ips record, which determines what packets could also be routed down a given WireGuard tunnel.
