From: Rain F. P. <rf...@wi...> - 2007-03-18 19:06:18
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It took way longer to get around to releasing, but it's finally here: Libwhisker2 2.4. This version represents a major milestone for Libwhisker2. The changelog for 2.4 is attached below. You will see that it is pretty extensive. Some of the big items/highlights: - Bug fixes! I started going over every line of code in Libwhisker with a fine-toothed comb. Along the way I solved various outstanding problems, better accomodated corner cases, and in general, improved the codebase. I highly recommend upgrading to 2.4 from any previous Libwhisker 2.x version. - I added a test harness, to verify functionality. This will better help with regression tests in the future, and writing test cases helped flush out some bugs. If anyone wants to help write test cases in order to achieve better coverage, please email me. Right now the 140 included tests achieve about 40% coverage of the library; my goal is to get over 75%. - I have officially tested OS platform and Perl version support, with the help of the new testing framework. Going forward I'm will be ensuring better support for Windows, as well as continued support for Linux. Contributors can help me test other platforms. Please see the docs/TESTED.txt document for the current state of tested platforms. Eventually I might release a nice matrix table which shows testing results in more detail. - Big network connectivity upgrades. Non-blocking connect support for Windows has arrived and been vetted. Also, extensive testing was done for SSL support with Net::SSL and Net::SSLeay. SSL keep-alives are now supported on Net::SSLeay (disabled by default, as it still needs more testing/vetting). The md5sum for the libwhisker2-2.4.tar.gz tarball (currently available at www.wiretrip.net, and eventually available on sourceforge.net) is: bdc618fa52bee38171c12e00bd99e18d I would also like to especially thank Sullo (of cirt.net) for his extensive help, feedback, and input. Enjoy, and please feel free to send me feedback, bug findings, etc. - rfp ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [] libwhisker 2.4 - Minor code change to utils_delete_lowercase_key(), but it doesn't change the functionality. Mostly just performance. - Modifications to Makefile.pl. I have become a big fan of the three argument open() variant, but that's not backwards compatible with older perl versions. So I switched everything back to the two argument version. - More modifications to Makefile.pl, having to do with backwards compatibility with older perl versions. - Major overhaul to utils_request_clone(). Basically changed it to fully copy the source request elements into the destination request, while deep copying embedded arrays and such. This is different behavior than previous, where utils_request_clone() would only copy a few specific values from the source to the destination. After thinking about it for quite a while, I decided the previous functionality was not very useful and had shortcomings. The current change in functionality only affects people who set unique values in the destination request *prior* to cloning. Under the old functionality, the unique values could be carried over. Under the new version, they will be clobbered/deleted to match the source request. - POD docs for utils_array_shuffle() was wrong; the function takes \@array as a parameter, not @array. - Added new option: {whisker}->{save_raw_chunks}. When set to a value of 1, the raw chunked data, including chunk sizes, will be saved to {whisker}->{data}. Normally libwhisker interprets the chunk sizes and stitches just the raw data together on your behalf; use this option if you just want the raw chunked server response. - Added new option: {whisker}->{hide_chunked_responses}. By default, when libwhisker gets a chunked response, it will interpret the chunks into the final output; however, the original 'Transfer-Encoding: chunked' header is left and the Content-Length header is not set. If you set the {hide_chunked_responses} option to 1, libwhisker will cleanup the response so that it resembles a regular non-chunked response...namely, libwhisker deletes the Transfer-Encoding header and adds an appropriate Content-Length header. Thus the fact that the server used chunk encoding is completely normalized out and hidden from the application. - Changes to _http_do_request_ex() and http_read_body() in order to account for the above two new options. - http_construct_headers() incorrectly included empty headers if a header name was found in {whisker}->{header_order} but was not actually set. - http_do_request() wasn't correctly returning the value returned by http_do_request_ex(), so {whisker}->{invalid_protocol_return_value} wasn't actually being honored. All fixed now. - If the server didn't return a Connection header, then http_do_request_ex looked into the request for a Connection header; when doing so, it assumed only one header would exist, and it would explicitly be named 'Connection'. This has been changed to use utils_find_lowercase_key() and to account for the possibility that multiple connection header values might be defined (in which case, it uses the first one). - SSL requests silently went through and failed if an SSL library wasn't available; now stream_new() should return an error. - Added ssl_is_available() function for an official way to check to see if SSL is installed. No more relying on $LW_SSL_LIB global variable! - This is a preemptive notice that $LW_SSL_LIB might be going away, and that you should no longer use it! Use the new ssl_is_installed() instead. - Changed how optional modules are loaded. MIME::Base64 and MD5 are only loaded when you try to use a related function; they are no longer loaded automatically every time you use LW2. This helps speed up load time, but the first call to md5() or [encode|decode]_base64() will have a small lag while the module is initially loaded. If you anticipate needing these functions and can't tolerate the initial latency of the first call, you should call them ahead of time with empty/test data in order to force the module load before it comes time to use them in latency-critical operations. Note that other libwhisker functions operate in the same manner--the internal pure-perl MD5, MD4, and DES/NTLM crypto code suffers latency upon the very first function call because the code has to be compiled before use. - The %LW2::AVAILABLE hash has been depreciated, since it was redundant with Perl's normal global symbol table. You can get the same information by checking for the module's $VERSION variable. - A major overhaul was made in the underlying stream/network communication code. Non-blocking connects() on Windows has been implemented, which should speed up error conditions and enforce timeouts on Windows platforms. Sockets are left in non-blocking state for normal TCP connections; they are put back into blocking more for everything else. Thus the stream code had to be updated to account for EWOULDBLOCK non-blocking conditions. - $LW_NONBLOCK_CONNECT is now 1/enabled by default. If you want to turn off non-blocking connects, set this to 0. If Libwhisker encounters errors during nonblocking connect operations, it will still degrade to regular (blocking) connections (with an eval+alarm wrapper). - While not a change to the code itself, I just want to officially note that I am no longer testing Libwhisker2 on platforms other than Windows and Linux. I just don't have the time to account for more OSes. This has been unofficial for quite a while; every so often, I would do a sanity check by running Libwhisker2 on various platforms (IRIX, Tru64, Solaris, etc.) and checking that most things were compatible. I have downsized my lab and purged those platforms, so I no longer have the ability to test them. I am still willing to support them, if someone else will run Libwhisker on them and send me bug reports. :) - A new $LW2::_SSL_LIBRARY variable was added, for internal purposes only. Use ssl_is_available(), as I make no guarantees that $_SSL_LIBRARY will stick around. - Blocking connects had an error, due to the use of a return in an eval block. The end result was that failed connect() attempts were being treated as successful, and then failing later down the line when the HTTP request write failed. Since the error appeared to happen during the write, and not during the connect, the default retry value was kicking in and the process was repeating a second time, making it a double-whammy. This would only occur on systems where libwhisker downgraded to a blocking connect, and a connection attempt was made to a closed or non-existing host/port combo. - It kind of goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyways: functions and variables beginning with '_' (underscore) are internal only and can be subject to change without notice or backwards compatibility. In short, you should not be using them; if you feel a certain internal function/variable is vital to your application and there is no way to achieve the functionality with other official libwhisker resources, please email me and we will come up with a way to resolve it. - The stream code wasn't updating the connect count ("syns"), which was causing {whisker}->{stats_syns} to always be zero. - Net::SSLeay SSL sockets are now closed with the SSL_shutdown function, which is more courteous than just closing the raw TCP connection. This allows for the SSL close notify alerts to be sent. - SSL keep-alive support has been added! It is currently only supported with Net::SSLeay, and is disabled by default. If you wish to enable it, you need to set $LW::LW_SSL_KEEPALIVE=1. This results in a drastic performance increase if you are making multiple requests to the same SSL server, and the server supports keep-alive connections (i.e. HTTP 1.1). This isn't enabled by default because I haven't been able to thoroughly test it against a large number of different SSL server implementations. And obviously keep-alive support only matters if you and the server use the proper HTTP headers to indicate the connection should be kept alive... - http_do_request() had a small change in order to make sure ssl_save_info was always honored with the new SSL keep-alive feature. - http_do_request[_ex]() had a string case comparision bug in handling keep-alives when the server didn't respond with an official connection header. The result was that connections were not kept-alive, even though they could have been. - http_do_request[_ex]() used a non-robust method to locate Connection headers in determining whether or not to close the connection. It's been changed to use utils_find_lowercase_key(). The close code was also refactored to take into account some other close situations. - dump()/_dumpd() was modified to no longer escape NULLs (\x00) as "\0", since that is a kludge shorthand which can backfire if numbers follow it. - dump()/_dump() didn't print out hash entries which had an empty key. - perltidy was used on all the src/ files. It was about that time...using multiple different text editors on multiple different platforms has resulted in a whitespace mess. - There is now a libwhisker2 test harness! Well, the beginnings of one, anyways. Essentially this your standard fare of tests to ensure the library functions are operating as expected, and that no regression errors creep into the mix. The new test/ directory houses the test harness and associated files. Included with the test harness is testserver.pl, a testcase web server which can be used to feed premade HTTP response testcases or create ad-hoc testcase responses based on URL designations. - uri_split() didn't set {whisker}->{ssl}=0 when splitting a non-HTTPS URL into a request hash that previously had SSL enabled. - Lots of POD documentation clarifications, additions, and updates. - Modified uri_absolute() to not add the port (":443") into the URL for HTTPS URLs (because it's redundant). - Modified uri_normalize() to now preserve any URL parameters and fragments, so things like "http://server/a/b/../p?foo" will now come out as "http://server/a/p?foo", while "http://server/a/b/../p?foo=/../" will also correctly come out as "http://server/a/p?foo=/../" and not "http://server/a/" - uri_strip_path_parameters() was not correctly returning any trailing slashes. This was actually caused by Perl's split(), which ignores trailing elements if no 3rd parameter limit is defined. Supposedly using a -1 for the limit fixes this in more recent Perls, but I'm not sure how backwards-compatible this is to older Perls. If split() behaves differently in this respect, I likely will create a run-time test to determine the available split behavior and act accordingly. - uri_parse_parameters() incorrectly took a shortcut and returned an empty parameter set if there was as single name parameter without a value. - uri_parse_parameters() had a little bit of refactoring, in order to use uri_unescape() rather than internally duplicating the same functionality. - uri_escape() didn't escape the #, /, or \ characters (which have special meaning to web browsers). I also added the @ and ; characters to the list to always escape, since they could have special meaning depending on where they are used (username or password embedded into the URL, path parameter, etc.). Better safe than sorry (and it doesn't hurt anything to encode them, other than wasting an extra two bytes per character). - utils_lowercase_keys() had an improper test to determine if the key needed lower-casing (it looked for tr/A-Z//c rather than tr/A-Z//). - utils_find_lowercase_keys() (and utils_find_key()) were modified to account for times when two unique normal keys result in the same lowercase name. Previously, libwhisker just returned value(s) associated with the first key that matches. Now the function gathers all values of all possible matches, and returns a value/array based on the final super-set. - utils_getline() and utils_getline_crlf() were modified to use \x0d\x0a instead of \r\n, in order to be more portable. - Added 'my' to limit the scope of the $POS internal position variables used by utils_getline() and utils_getline_crlf(). - _stream_buffer_read() used len() instead of length(). - http_req2line() incorrectly added {uri_user} if {uri_password} was set, resulting in a string which looked like "user:user" rather than "user:pass" - Major overhaul to http_fixup_request() to make it more robust, and to clean out any lingering values which may conflict with having a RFC- compliant request. http_fixup_request() will now forcibly make the request HTTP compliant as much as possible. - Changes to all the various cookie functions, in order to accomodate the default domain and URL of a cookie and otherwise be RFC 2109 compliant. All of the information regarding how Libwhisker handles cookies is now available in the new docs/cookies.txt file. All changes are backwards compatible with previous 2.4 formats and functionality, with a single exception: cookie domains in the form of 'http://server.com/' are no longer accepted (they were never legal, and I'm not sure why I implemented that superfluous parsing to begin with). Also, the 'expires' cookie value is now always undefined. - cookie_write() didn't ignore the 'secure' restriction when $override was true. - Added cookie_get_names() function, so you can get the names for use with cookie_get() without having to access the raw $jar structure (which should be an undefined object that shouldn't be used directly). - Added cookie_get_valid_names() function, which gives you the list of cookies which qualify as valid for the specified domain and url. - Modified cookie_set() to delete the given cookie name if the cookie value is empty or undefined. - Added utils_carp() and utils_croak(), which act like the respective functions in the Carp module (except not quite as onfigurable/flexible). - Changed all internal use of die() and warn() to use the new utils_carp() and utils_croak() functions. - Added time_mktime(), which is similar to the mktime function in the POSIX module or the TimeLocal module. Namely it converts a set of values (such as those returned by localtime/gmtime) back to a single seconds value. - Added time_gmtolocal() which converts a GMT seconds value to a local timezone value. - Tweak the internal _http_get*() functions to not enter an infinite loop when reading from a partially filled buffer stream. - The internal _http_getall() function didn't clear stream->{bufin}, which is technically wrong but never caused a problem since _http_getall() was only used in situations where we read until EOF and then close the stream (and thus never use {bufin} again). - http_construct_headers() did not print out all values of a multi-value header if the header_order explicitly only printed out some (but not all) of the values; the remaining values were ignored. - Changed how the max_size parameter of the internal _http_getall() function is handled. Since it's an internal function, you shouldn't be using it anyway. :) - http_read_body() now clears {whisker}->{data} for all code paths, which it should have been doing but only did some of the time; caused a bug when the length parameter == 0. - http_read_body() how shortcuts out if the supplied length parameter is negative. - The max_size calculations when handling chunked bodies for http_read_body() were off, causing all kinds of read problems when a max_size was specified in the request. Note that when you specify a max_size, you run the risk of interrupting the chunk processing, which means the connection has to be closed and you lose any keep-alive advantages. - Just a quick note that http_read_body() doesn't quite honor {max_size} if {save_raw_chunks} is enabled. Only the size of the actual data value is computed against the max_size limit; the extra bytes comprising the chunk values, as well as any trailing headers, are not calculated against the max_size value. This might change in the future, but I feel this is an acceptable caveat for now. - Change to decode_unicode() in order to get rid of a Perl warning involving pack(). - http_reset() was modified to forcibly clear the internal http host cache. - Turns out Net::SSL die()'s during connection attempts if they don't succeed, and libwhisker wasn't trapping the die(). Basically just wrapped the connect in an eval{}. - Sprinkled in some missing binmode()'s to appease the spawn of Gates. - http_do_request_ex() incorrectly set {whisker}->{http_message} instead of {message} when dealing with HTTP/0.9 requests. - There was a call to Net::SSLeay::ctrl() which was causing occasional errors. The code was introduced way back in Libwhisker 1.5 for SSL session resuming, and has been carried through since then. It's now been removed. - Added the {whisker}->{shortcut_on_404} option, which causes http_do_request to *NOT* read the response body content and instead return (although all headers are read and returned like normal; just the body content is skipped). This can be a useful speed improvement for CGI scanners built on Libwhisker, since a 404 normally indicates the file isn't found, and there's no point on reading the body content. (Ultimately it's essentially the same outcome as a HEAD requestr; but in this case, it's like a HEAD request for 404's & a GET request for everything else, without having to make two different requests to get the body content for non-404 responses). - Sprinkled in some more error checking for Net::SSLeay functions. Apparently not all functions return the error value; it has to be checked for separately. - The Net::SSLeay stream had a bug when used to connect via a proxy, resulting in a malformed CONNECT request. - Auth_brute_force() was incorrectly calling auth_set_header() instead of auth_set(). |