Caching path info is generally useful. For instance, it speeds up "nix
path-info -rS /run/current-system" (i.e. showing the closure sizes of
all paths in the closure of the current system) from 5.6s to 0.15s.
This also eliminates some APIs like Store::queryDeriver() and
Store::queryReferences().
This enables an optimisation in hydra-queue-runner, preventing a
download of a NAR it just uploaded to the cache when reading files
like hydra-build-products.
This is currently only used by the Hydra queue runner rework, but like
eff5021eaa it presumably will be useful
for the C++ rewrite of nix-push and
download-from-binary-cache. (@shlevy)
Also, move a few free-standing functions into StoreAPI and Derivation.
Also, introduce a non-nullable smart pointer, ref<T>, which is just a
wrapper around std::shared_ptr ensuring that the pointer is never
null. (For reference-counted values, this is better than passing a
"T&", because the latter doesn't maintain the refcount. Usually, the
caller will have a shared_ptr keeping the value alive, but that's not
always the case, e.g., when passing a reference to a std::thread via
std::bind.)
This is not strictly needed for integrity (since we already include
the NAR hash in the fingerprint) but it helps against endless data
attacks [1]. (However, this will also require
download-from-binary-cache.pl to bail out if it receives more than the
specified number of bytes.)
[1] https://isis.poly.edu/~jcappos/papers/cappos_mirror_ccs_08.pdf
We only need to sign the store path, NAR hash and references (the
"fingerprint"). Everything else is irrelevant to security. For
instance, the compression algorithm or the hash of the compressed NAR
don't matter as long as the contents of the uncompressed NAR are
correct.
(Maybe we should include derivers in the fingerprint, but they're
broken and nobody cares about them. Also, it might be nice in the
future if .narinfos contained signatures from multiple independent
signers. But that's impossible if the deriver is included in the
fingerprint, since everybody will tend to have a different deriver for
the same store path.)
Also renamed the "Signature" field to "Sig" since the format changed
in an incompatible way.
Sodium's Ed25519 signatures are much shorter than OpenSSL's RSA
signatures. Public keys are also much shorter, so they're now
specified directly in the nix.conf option ‘binary-cache-public-keys’.
The new command ‘nix-store --generate-binary-cache-key’ generates and
prints a public and secret key.
Spotted by Perl 5.20:
Possible precedence issue with control flow operator at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.20.1/x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi/Nix/Utils.pm line 46.
This makes things more efficient (we don't need to use an SSH master
connection, and we only start a single remote process) and gets rid of
locking issues (the remote nix-store process will keep inputs and
outputs locked as long as they're needed).
It also makes it more or less secure to connect directly to the root
account on the build machine, using a forced command
(e.g. ‘command="nix-store --serve --write"’). This bypasses the Nix
daemon and is therefore more efficient.
Also, don't call nix-store to import the output paths.
There is a long-standing race condition when copying a closure to a
remote machine, particularly affecting build-remote.pl: the client
first asks the remote machine which paths it already has, then copies
over the missing paths. If the garbage collector kicks in on the
remote machine between the first and second step, the already-present
paths may be deleted. The missing paths may then refer to deleted
paths, causing nix-copy-closure to fail. The client now performs both
steps using a single remote Nix call (using ‘nix-store --serve’),
locking all paths in the closure while querying.
I changed the --serve protocol a bit (getting rid of QueryCommand), so
this breaks the SSH substituter from older versions. But it was marked
experimental anyway.
Fixes#141.
NAR info files in binary caches can now have a cryptographic signature
that Nix will verify before using the corresponding NAR file.
To create a private/public key pair for signing and verifying a binary
cache, do:
$ openssl genrsa -out ./cache-key.sec 2048
$ openssl rsa -in ./cache-key.sec -pubout > ./cache-key.pub
You should also come up with a symbolic name for the key, such as
"cache.example.org-1". This will be used by clients to look up the
public key. (It's a good idea to number keys, in case you ever need
to revoke/replace one.)
To create a binary cache signed with the private key:
$ nix-push --dest /path/to/binary-cache --key ./cache-key.sec --key-name cache.example.org-1
The public key (cache-key.pub) should be distributed to the clients.
They should have a nix.conf should contain something like:
signed-binary-caches = *
binary-cache-public-key-cache.example.org-1 = /path/to/cache-key.pub
If all works well, then if Nix fetches something from the signed
binary cache, you will see a message like:
*** Downloading ‘http://cache.example.org/nar/7dppcj5sc1nda7l54rjc0g5l1hamj09j-subversion-1.7.11’ (signed by ‘cache.example.org-1’) to ‘/nix/store/7dppcj5sc1nda7l54rjc0g5l1hamj09j-subversion-1.7.11’...
On the other hand, if the signature is wrong, you get a message like
NAR info file `http://cache.example.org/7dppcj5sc1nda7l54rjc0g5l1hamj09j.narinfo' has an invalid signature; ignoring
Signatures are implemented as a single line appended to the NAR info
file, which looks like this:
Signature: 1;cache.example.org-1;HQ9Xzyanq9iV...muQ==
Thus the signature has 3 fields: a version (currently "1"), the ID of
key, and the base64-encoded signature of the SHA-256 hash of the
contents of the NAR info file up to but not including the Signature
line.
Issue #75.
If the database is opened through perl bindings (and even though nix.conf has
use-sqlite-wal set to false), the database is automatically converted into WAL
mode. This makes the next nix process to access the database convert it back to
"truncate". If the database is still open at the time in wal mode by the perl
program, this fails and crashes the nix doing the wal -> truncate conversion.
