nfsd: randomize SETCLIENTID reply to help distinguish servers

NFSv4.1 has built-in trunking support that allows a client to determine
whether two connections to two different IP addresses are actually to
the same server.  NFSv4.0 does not, but RFC 7931 attempts to provide
clients a means to do this, basically by performing a SETCLIENTID to one
address and confirming it with a SETCLIENTID_CONFIRM to the other.

Linux clients since 05f4c350ee02 "NFS: Discover NFSv4 server trunking
when mounting" implement a variation on this suggestion.  It is possible
that other clients do too.

This depends on the clientid and verifier not being accepted by an
unrelated server.  Since both are 64-bit values, that would be very
unlikely if they were random numbers.  But they aren't:

knfsd generates the 64-bit clientid by concatenating the 32-bit boot
time (in seconds) and a counter.  This makes collisions between
clientids generated by the same server extremely unlikely.  But
collisions are very likely between clientids generated by servers that
boot at the same time, and it's quite common for multiple servers to
boot at the same time.  The verifier is a concatenation of the
SETCLIENTID time (in seconds) and a counter, so again collisions between
different servers are likely if multiple SETCLIENTIDs are done at the
same time, which is a common case.

Therefore recent NFSv4.0 clients may decide two different servers are
really the same, and mount a filesystem from the wrong server.

Fortunately the Linux client, since 55b9df93ddd6 "nfsv4/v4.1: Verify the
client owner id during trunking detection", only does this when given
the non-default "migration" mount option.

The fault is really with RFC 7931, and needs a client fix, but in the
meantime we can mitigate the chance of these collisions by randomizing
the starting value of the counters used to generate clientids and
verifiers.

Reported-by: Frank Sorenson <fsorenso@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@redhat.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions