Commit Graph
6 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
jaap-jan 04faef6597 Move files to and from a host over SFTP
M2's file transfer, built bottom-up: an SFTP session on the SSH layer, a
transfer queue in a project of its own, and the two-pane browser the design
asked for replacing the screen that said it did not exist. Remote listings
carry names, sizes, modification times and a real drwxr-xr-x — nothing in this
repository could render a POSIX mode before — and the queue moves one file at a
time with progress, throughput and resume.

The design import assumed this would be an SFTP subsystem channel on
ISshConnection, beside the shell on a transport that is already up. SSH.NET
does not offer that: SftpClient derives from BaseClient and owns its own
transport, and there is no supported way to hand it an SshClient's session. So
file transfer opens a second authenticated connection, and it is named for
that rather than dressed up as a channel — OpenSftpAsync is on
ISftpSessionFactory, not on a connection. The difference is visible to a user:
the host records a second login, and a host whose password is typed each time
asks for it again on this screen. It goes through the same host key gate, the
same pin and the same two refusals a shell does, so a fingerprint approved for
a terminal is approved here and one approved here reaches the other machines
with the next sync. docs/design-import-gaps.md is corrected, and marked as the
one row where what shipped differs from what it predicted.

Nothing is written at its final name until it is complete. Every transfer goes
to a .dodossh-part file beside its destination and is renamed into place at the
end, so an interrupted transfer can never be mistaken for a finished one —
which matters most for what this screen is actually for, which is copying a
build artefact onto a server and then running it. A destination that already
exists is refused outright rather than overwritten: the queue has no way to
ask, and silently replacing a file somebody's process is serving is the worse
of the two failures. The remote pane has DELETE and MKDIR so that refusal is
not a dead end. A test against the container pins the assumption underneath all
of this — that SFTP's rename does not clobber.

Resume works within a run of the application and not across a restart, and the
limit is deliberate rather than unfinished. Nothing records which source wrote
a part file, and resuming one on the strength of its name matching is how a
corrupt artefact gets delivered with nothing reporting a failure; a part file
found at startup is started over. Making it survive a restart needs the
preferences store this client still has not got. The offset a resume starts at
is the part file's own length rather than the transfer's recorded progress: a
cancellation can land between a write completing and the counter moving, and
only one of those two is a fact about the bytes that are there.

The queue and its connection outlive a lock, as shells do. LockAsync already
argues that locking must not destroy work in flight — it is what somebody does
when they walk away from the machine, which is exactly when a long transfer is
most likely to be running — so TransfersViewModel is created once and the vault
is attached on unlock and detached on lock. What locking takes is the host
list, and it has to: those rows carry decrypted secrets.

DodoSSH.Client.Transfer is a new project rather than more of Client.Ssh. The
two answer different questions — one is about reaching a host, the other about
moving bytes and what to do when moving them stops halfway — and this is the
only client project that deliberately touches the local filesystem.

Three defects the tests found, none of which review would have. SftpPath.Name
answered an empty string for the root. NavigateRemoteAsync wrapped itself in
the busy guard, so navigating from inside another command did nothing at all
and the remote pane simply stayed empty after connecting, with no failure
anywhere to explain it. And opening an SFTP session per test made two
handshakes per test — this client learns a host key by being refused — which
pushed the SSH assembly past sshd's MaxStartups and failed a different few
unrelated tests each run; the session is shared through the fixture now, with
the reason written where the next person will hit it.

1004 tests green across 18 projects, 24 of them new: the SFTP subsystem against
the OpenSSH container, the queue against a real temporary directory and a fake
host, and three more layout measurements because a screen this window has never
laid out is a screen never checked.

Not verified: the screen has not been looked at running. The layout harness
measures it at the window's minimum in three shapes, which is the class of
defect that has shipped here before, but reaching it in the application needs
the compose stack, the migrations, the API and a browser sign-in. What is still
absent — the status bar's transfer count, dragging between the panes,
transferring a directory, and sftp over a bastion — is in
docs/design-import-gaps.md.
2026-07-31 11:07:29 +02:00
jaap-jan 94e11f5e38 update packages
ci / build and test (ubuntu) (push) Canceled after 0s
ci / build (windows) (push) Canceled after 0s
2026-07-31 10:12:05 +02:00
jaap-jan 211eba0666 Keep host key trust in the vault, and make it withdrawable
ci / build and test (ubuntu) (push) Canceled after 0s
ci / build (windows) (push) Canceled after 0s
A fingerprint approved once is now approved on every machine and survives a
restart, because host key trust is a vault item type rather than a dictionary
that dies with the process. InMemoryKnownHostStore was what shipped, so the user
was asked to verify a fingerprint on every single connection — which is the gap
most likely to train somebody to click through the one warning that actually
matters. A warning that appears when nothing is wrong teaches that nothing is
ever wrong.

The fourth item type, and like the third it cost no sync logic: a row, an EF
configuration, a migration, a server kind; a secret, a codec, a merge, a cipher,
a repository facade and a session property. One row in the client registry. The
reconciler, the mirror, the repository, the outbox and the pull filter were not
touched. SyncEntityType.KnownHostKey and AadResourceType.KnownHostKey were
already reserved, so neither the contract nor docs/crypto.md changed.

One item per (host, port, algorithm), because a server legitimately offers
several host keys and which one gets negotiated is not ours to predict. Pinning
per endpoint would make an algorithm change indistinguishable from an attack.

The label is derived rather than stored, which is the one place this type
departs from the other three. A user never names a pin — there is nothing to
name it after but the three fields it already has — and a stored label is a
second copy of data that can disagree with the first after a merge. Relabel
returns the secret unchanged, and says why.

The store answers the handshake without touching the disk. SshNetConnectionFactory
calls FindAsync from inside SSH.NET's synchronous HostKeyReceived event, over
.GetAwaiter().GetResult(), which cannot be avoided; doing SQLite I/O plus an AEAD
open per lookup there would put the handshake behind the cache. So decryption
happens in OpenAsync and RefreshAsync — on unlock and after each sync pass,
exactly where the host and key lists already reload — and FindAsync is a
dictionary read under a lock with no await inside it.

That snapshot is where the one real bug in this change lived. Install originally
merged the live pins over the freshly loaded snapshot, to protect a TrustAsync
that had landed while the read was in flight. It would also have resurrected
every pin the user had just forgotten, and stopped a withdrawal made on another
machine from ever taking effect — the store would have healed the deletion back
into existence on every refresh. Replacing wholesale and discarding the read
instead is correct because writes are the rare case: every write bumps a
generation counter, and a refresh whose stamp is stale throws itself away rather
than winning. Nothing found this but reading the method again; it is the kind of
mistake that passes every test written before it, because the test that catches
it is the one the bug tells you to write.

Forgetting is new, and persistence is what made it mandatory rather than
convenient. A mismatch is a hard refusal with no way to continue — deliberately,
and that stays — so pinning a key permanently is also a way to make a
legitimately rebuilt server permanently unreachable. Before this change the pin
died at exit and the problem solved itself; now it does not.

ForgetAsync drops every algorithm for an endpoint, and it is reachable from the
host editor rather than from the warning. Putting it on the mismatch banner would
have made it two clicks from "this may be an attack" to "connect anyway", which
is the affordance the hard refusal exists to deny. The banner already promised
the key could be removed in the host's settings; that promise is now true and
points at the button.

Trust recorded on another machine becomes visible at the next sync pass, not
immediately, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. The failure it
produces is a first-contact prompt for a host a colleague approved a minute ago:
answerable, and self-correcting on the next pass. The opposite trade — polling
the vault on the handshake thread to close a one-minute window — buys nothing
and costs the property above. The dangerous direction is not reachable at all: a
pin recorded here enters the snapshot as part of recording it, so a refresh can
never discard a local trust decision.

The server learns nothing, and this is the item type where the temptation was
real. A plaintext host column would let a known-hosts screen sort and page
without decrypting anything, and it would hand the operator the map of every
user's estate — assembled, as these things are, out of facts that are each
individually harmless. A host row concedes an address only when relay is
switched on and the database refuses to store one otherwise (ADR 0004); there is
no equivalent excuse here. The table has no column to put one in, and the EF
configuration says so where somebody adding it would be standing.

Two things about the migration in this commit are worth knowing, because both
came out of getting it wrong.

It was hand-written first, including its .Designer.cs, and that version is not
what is here. Verifying it turned up something that had been quietly assumed:
Migration_AppliedCleanly_WithNoPendingModelChanges does not check the model
snapshot. It asserts that migrations applied and that none are pending, which a
wrong snapshot satisfies perfectly — the snapshot only matters as the diff base
for the *next* migrations add, so an incorrect one passes the whole suite and
corrupts the following migration instead. The real check is to generate a
throwaway migration and confirm its Up and Down come out empty. They did, and
the generated designer was byte-identical to the transcribed one across all 1255
lines, so the hand-written work was in fact correct.

Then dotnet ef migrations remove --no-build deleted the wrong migration. With
--no-build the tool reads the previously compiled assembly rather than the files
on disk, and the probe had just changed which migration was last, so it removed
AddKnownHostKeyItem and reverted the snapshot. That turned out to leave exactly
the right diff base, so the migration here is EF's own output rather than a
transcription — a better outcome than the one that was interrupted, arrived at
by accident. Never pass --no-build to migrations remove.

Mutation tested, all three sabotages detected: dropping the algorithm from
KnownHostIdentity.For, merging instead of replacing in Install, and pointing
KnownHostKeyCipher at PortForward — which is what a cast from the wire enum's 10
would silently produce. Each is caught both by an assertion about the mechanism
and by a behavioural test that never mentions it; the resource-type sabotage is
caught by the table from d10a38d and nothing else, which is what that table is
for.

The end-to-end slice now approves the real sshd's host key through the vault,
pushes it, and reads it back on the second simulated machine — including a check
that the server learned no address, and that the second machine answers null for
an algorithm never offered.

845 tests green. Zero warnings, dotnet format clean.

Three things are deliberately not fixed. A tombstone queued over a create that
was never pushed is refused by the server as Invalid and parked; that is
pre-existing for all four item types, and the fix belongs in
VaultItemRepository.DeleteAsync rather than here. Deleting a host, or changing
its address, orphans its pins — both are correct as trust decisions, since a pin
describes an endpoint and not a bookmark, but nothing surfaces the leftovers.
And there is no interface listing pins at all: trust is created at the connect
prompt and withdrawn in the host editor. A known-hosts list is where the orphans
would become visible, and it wants the vault column rework first, for the same
reason the credential editor does.
2026-07-30 11:00:39 +02:00
jaap-jan 5fccd53824 Add the Avalonia app and the xterm renderer, and fix two real bugs
The terminal works end to end. A new integration test drives a real sshd in
a container through a real PTY, the real pump, the real loopback WebSocket
with its token and origin checks, and a ClientWebSocket standing in for the
page: the login banner arrives, typed input round-trips, and `stty size`
reports the 100x30 the session asked for. The only untested link left is
xterm drawing bytes it was handed.

The WebView is de-risked on Windows, which was the plan's largest risk. Not
by assertion: with the app running there is an established TCP connection
from msedgewebview2 to the data plane port, so WebView2 launched, navigated
to the loopback page, executed terminal.js, and completed the WebSocket
handshake against the real token and origin checks. Linux remains unproven
and the package's own release notes now corroborate the concern -- Linux uses
a WPE backend, and it ships a NativeWebDialog described as useful where
embedded WebViews may be unavailable.

Two bugs found by building it, both of which would have shipped:

- ShellStream.Write buffers and needs an explicit Flush. Without one a
  keystroke is accepted, reported as written, and never reaches the remote:
  the terminal displays output perfectly and simply stops responding to
  input. SSH.NET's own WriteLine flushes, which is why the earlier spike
  never hit it. Found by isolating the pump against real SSH and reading
  BytesRead=51 -- banner and prompt through, nothing after.
- The Windows app manifest needs a supportedOS list, or Avalonia's native
  control host fails outright and the terminal never starts.

Also fixed a genuinely flaky test I happened to catch: SyncCursorTests
tampered with the *last* base64url character, whose low bits the decoder
ignores when the input length is not a multiple of three -- so a tampered
cursor sometimes decoded to identical bytes and verified. It failed roughly
one run in thirty, depending on a random key. Now tampers the penultimate
character, which is fully significant at every length; 40 consecutive runs
are clean.

xterm 6.0.0 plus the fit and webgl addons are vendored as UMD bundles rather
than built with npm, so a clean clone needs only the .NET SDK. Provenance
and licences are recorded next to them, along with the UMD global names
terminal.js depends on -- a bundle that switched to ES modules would load
without error and leave Terminal undefined.

The renderer acknowledges output from term.write's completion callback, not
on receipt. Acknowledging early would return flow-control credit for bytes
the screen has not caught up with, which is the one thing the credit window
exists to measure.

TerminalWorkspace moved into DodoSSH.Client.Terminal: it has no Avalonia
dependency, and having it there is what let the end-to-end test exist at all.

404 tests pass, zero warnings on a clean rebuild, format clean.
2026-07-28 22:30:42 +02:00
jaap-jan eb354bcdd9 Add the SSH session layer and the terminal data plane
The throughput harness the plan requires before any UI, plus the SSH
plumbing under it. 94 new tests, no WebView involved.

Credit-based flow control is what makes `yes` survivable. A terminal renders
at 60 Hz at best while a remote produces output as fast as the network
allows, and the difference has to accumulate somewhere or be refused.
Credit is reserved *before* reading, never after: because the pump cannot
read more than the renderer has room for, the coalescing buffer is bounded
by the window rather than by how fast the remote can talk. When credit runs
out the pump stops reading, SSH's own receive window closes, and the remote
sshd blocks -- backpressure to the source with no custom protocol.

Verified by falsification, not just by passing: with the credit gate removed
three tests fail, including the throughput harness's bounded-memory
assertion. Acknowledgements are clamped because they cross into JavaScript,
where a buggy or hostile page could otherwise claim to have rendered a
gigabyte and talk the host into an unbounded read.

Host key trust is enforced by *failing* the connection rather than
prompting inside the handshake. SSH.NET raises verification synchronously,
so consulting the user there would block the handshake on a UI round trip
and deadlock the first time the prompt needed the UI thread. Unknown host
and changed key become distinct exceptions the caller resolves
asynchronously. A mismatch has no retry path at all: a dialog offering to
continue is how users are trained to click through the one warning that
actually indicates interception. A legitimately rebuilt server is handled by
removing the pin in settings, away from the moment of connecting.

The data plane serves the renderer page from the same loopback listener as
the socket, which makes Origin predictable -- always http://127.0.0.1:{port}
-- where a WebView virtual-host mapping would give a different origin per
backend and nothing to validate. The token is substituted at serve time, so
it never touches disk and never appears in a URL. Being clear about what
that buys: not protection from a process running as this user, which can
read our memory anyway, but from a page in the user's browser attempting
WebSocket connections to loopback ports, which is a real and routine thing.

Two bugs the tests caught. The accept loop handled connections serially, so
an upgraded WebSocket parked it inside the receive loop and every later
request went unanswered -- the page's own script among them. The suite hung
rather than failed, which is how I found it. And SHA-1 is unavoidable here:
RFC 6455 mandates it for Sec-WebSocket-Accept, where it authenticates
nothing. Suppressed narrowly with that reasoning; the alternative,
HttpListener.AcceptWebSocketAsync, throws PlatformNotSupportedException off
Windows.
2026-07-28 21:58:55 +02:00
jaap-jan 885fb17bdc Clear the SSH gate: window-change reaches the remote, and licence as MIT
Licence is MIT, set solution-wide rather than only on the packable project:
DodoSSH.Contracts is published so clients can build against it, and a
package with no licence expression is one a corporate policy scanner
rejects outright.

The SSH.NET spike is the M1 client gate and it passes. SSH.NET 2025.1.0
exposes ShellStream.ChangeWindowSize, but a method existing is not the
remote observing it, so the tests read `stty size` back from a real sshd
after resizing rather than asserting the call did not throw. Repeated
resizes each take effect too, which matters because dragging a window edge
produces a stream of them. The IChannelSession fallback is not needed.

Also verified against a real sshd: password and public-key auth, that the
host key arrives as a raw blob we can fingerprint ourselves rather than
reading SSH.NET's MD5 property, and that refusing the key via CanTrust
actually aborts the connection -- without which the TOFU dialog would be
decoration.

Kept as a permanent suite, not deleted after the spike. An upgrade that
silently stopped sending the request would present as wrapped output only
after a resize, which is easy to misattribute to the terminal emulator.

Two bugs in the test itself, both worth naming because either would have
been read as "resize does not work":

- A PTY emits CRLF, and the anchored regex rejected the CR. The output
  visibly contained `24 80` while the match failed.
- Each read can begin with output still buffered from the previous command,
  including its size line. Taking the first match would have reported the
  pre-resize size.

platform-flags.md now records window-change as resolved rather than
unverified -- a stale flag is worse than none -- plus the three real SSH.NET
limits found on the way: ShellStream does not override ReadAsync so every
idle session parks a pool thread, one connection cannot serve both
SshClient and SftpClient, and agent forwarding needs an upstream change.
2026-07-28 16:52:09 +02:00