[gnutls-dev] Generating/regenerating params

Stephen Frost sfrost at snowman.net
Sat Mar 6 08:19:31 CET 2004


Greetings,

  I've run into a very difficult problem when trying to safely
  regenerate dh/rsa parameters.  The setup is like this:

  There's a global context which has creds
  (gnutls_certificate_credentials) and all of the CA certs and whatnot
  are loaded into it.

  We then have a local (per thread) context which copies the cred from 
  the global context, but just the pointer (there isn't a function to
  copy the whole thing...).

  We then set params in creds in each thread, cacheing the params in a
  file and regenerating the params whenever the file disappears, which
  we plan to make happen periodically as is recommended in various
  comments in the example GNU TLS server.

  There's a couple problems here though:  The params are shared across
  all threads because of the single global context with creds.  I worry
  about regenerating them because I don't want to break existing
  connections or ones which are in the process of setting up.  I don't
  see any way (beyond re-reading all the certs which I expect would kill
  performance) to make the creds be local though.

  What's the right way to do this?  Have multiple threads going and
  still periodically regenerate the rsa/dh params without breaking
  anything or leaking memory or anything?  Is it safe to just init the
  rsa/dh params and then just change them with generate2 or import_raw?
  Will that break existing connections or other threads which are
  setting up their connections?  Do I still need to call set_XX_params?

  	Thanks,
	
		Stephen
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