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No way to set `SSL_OP_IGNORE_UNEXPECTED_EOF` for ::HTTPClient, but Google services don't send `close_notify`

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#18,974 2 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
ruby
Domain
api, security

Research direction

Start by reading the HTTPClient SSL setup in lib/httpclient.rb and lib/httpclient/ssl_config.rb, then trace BaseService#new_client and Google::Apis::ClientOptions. Compare the proposed ssl_options field with the alternative Faraday hook. Done means callers can customize the SSL options for the BaseService HTTPClient, including SSL_OP_IGNORE_UNEXPECTED_EOF for Google API requests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Summary
  • We want to set SSL_OP_IGNORE_UNEXPECTED_EOF to deal with Google server TLS implementation
  • ::HTTPClient provides no way to do that, not even through global settings
  • Monkeypatching BaseService#new_client seems like the only path forward
Background

My company—using Openssl 3—is seeing frequent SSL errors while using this library to interact with Google services that look like SSL_read: unexpected eof while reading. Specific services we've seen this from in the last few days are Bigquery and Storage.

We noticed that the public HTTPS load balancer service (https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/https) is documented to not send a close_notify, so we feel like it's pretty likely that at least some Google APIs also don't do this, and that's why we're observing this behavior.

HTTP clients can protect against truncation attacks using Content-Length header, so we're comfortable using the SSL_OP_IGNORE_UNEXPECTED_EOF option to ignore these unexpected EOFs for Google services.

Problem

However, there is no way we can see to actually set this option on the SSL sockets created by this library. It uses ::HTTPClient, which sets some default SSL options (https://github.com/nahi/httpclient/blob/master/lib/httpclient.rb#L446 --> https://github.com/nahi/httpclient/blob/master/lib/httpclient/ssl_config.rb#L162).

Ideally we'd be able to set SSL_OP_IGNORE_UNEXPECTED_EOF specifically when making requests to Google APIs, but even if we were comfortable always having it set, we still can't: ::HTTPClient doesn't check OpenSSL::SSL::SSLContext::DEFAULT_PARAMS or provide some other way to set SSL options globally.

Proposed fix

Give users of the library a way to further customize the SSL options used by ::HTTPClient instance used by BaseService. Some potential ideas:

Our workaround

In the meantime, we're probably going to monkeypatch BaseService#new_client to edit the SSL configuration. This will be brittle to library changes and hard to test (as we end up mocking out google services at higher level in most of our tests). We'd love any other ideas / or if there's some other way we're missing to set this option!

Dominant language
Ruby
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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