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sshpeer: initial definition and implementation of new SSH protocol The existing SSH protocol has several design flaws. Future commits will elaborate on these flaws as new features are introduced to combat these flaws. For now, hopefully you can take me for my word that a ground up rewrite of the SSH protocol is needed. This commit lays the foundation for a new SSH protocol by defining a mechanism to upgrade the SSH transport channel away from the default (version 1) protocol to something modern (which we'll call "version 2" for now). This upgrade process is detailed in the internals documentation for the wire protocol. The gist of it is the client sends a request line preceding the "hello" command/line which basically says "I'm requesting an upgrade: here's what I support." If the server recognizes that line, it processes the upgrade request and the transport channel is switched to use the new version of the protocol. If not, it sends an empty response, which is how all Mercurial SSH servers from the beginning of time reacted to unknown commands. The upgrade request is effectively ignored and the client continues to use the existing version of the protocol as if nothing happened. The new version of the SSH protocol is completely identical to version 1 aside from the upgrade dance and the bytes that follow. The immediate bytes that follow the protocol switch are defined to be a length framed "capabilities: " line containing the remote's advertised capabilities. In reality, this looks very similar to what the "hello" response would look like. But it will evolve quickly. The methodology by which the protocol will evolve is important. I'm not going to introduce the new protocol all at once. That would likely lead to endless bike shedding and forward progress would stall. Instead, I intend to tricle out new features and diversions from the existing protocol in small, incremental changes. To support the gradual evolution of the protocol, the on-the-wire advertised protocol name contains an "exp" to denote "experimental" and a 4 digit field to capture the sub-version of the protocol. Whenever we make a BC change to the wire protocol, we can increment this version and lock out all older clients because it will appear as a completely different protocol version. This means we can incur as many breaking changes as we want. We don't have to commit to supporting any one feature or idea for a long period of time. We can even evolve the handshake mechanism, because that is defined as being an implementation detail of the negotiated protocol version! Hopefully this lowers the barrier to accepting changes to the protocol and for experimenting with "radical" ideas during its development. In core, sshpeer received most of the attention. We haven't even implemented the server bits for the new protocol in core yet. Instead, we add very primitive support to our test server, mainly just to exercise the added code paths in sshpeer. Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2061 # no-check-commit because of required foo_bar naming
author Gregory Szorc <gregory.szorc@gmail.com>
date Tue, 06 Feb 2018 11:08:36 -0800
parents c29efd272395
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[This file is here for historical purposes, all recent contributors
should appear in the changelog directly]

Andrea Arcangeli <andrea at suse.de>
Thomas Arendsen Hein <thomas at intevation.de>
Goffredo Baroncelli <kreijack at libero.it>
Muli Ben-Yehuda <mulix at mulix.org>
Mikael Berthe <mikael at lilotux.net>
Benoit Boissinot <bboissin at gmail.com>
Brendan Cully <brendan at kublai.com>
Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml at free.fr>
Jake Edge <jake at edge2.net>
Michael Fetterman <michael.fetterman at intel.com>
Edouard Gomez <ed.gomez at free.fr>
Eric Hopper <hopper at omnifarious.org>
Alecs King <alecsk at gmail.com>
Volker Kleinfeld <Volker.Kleinfeld at gmx.de>
Vadim Lebedev <vadim at mbdsys.com>
Christopher Li <hg at chrisli.org>
Chris Mason <mason at suse.com>
Colin McMillen <mcmillen at cs.cmu.edu>
Wojciech Milkowski <wmilkowski at interia.pl>
Chad Netzer <chad.netzer at gmail.com>
Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com>
Vicent SeguĂ­ Pascual <vseguip at gmail.com>
Sean Perry <shaleh at speakeasy.net>
Nguyen Anh Quynh <aquynh at gmail.com>
Ollivier Robert <roberto at keltia.freenix.fr>
Alexander Schremmer <alex at alexanderweb.de>
Arun Sharma <arun at sharma-home.net>
Josef "Jeff" Sipek <jeffpc at optonline.net>
Kevin Smith <yarcs at qualitycode.com>
TK Soh <teekaysoh at yahoo.com>
Radoslaw Szkodzinski <astralstorm at gorzow.mm.pl>
Samuel Tardieu <sam at rfc1149.net>
K Thananchayan <thananck at yahoo.com>
Andrew Thompson <andrewkt at aktzero.com>
Michael S. Tsirkin <mst at mellanox.co.il>
Rafael Villar Burke <pachi at mmn-arquitectos.com>
Tristan Wibberley <tristan at wibberley.org>
Mark Williamson <mark.williamson at cl.cam.ac.uk>