This setting belongs to the individual connection, not to a configuration
shared by many connections. (If a default value is desired, that can be handled
by the application code that calls mbedtls_ssl_set_mtu().)
There are at least two ways in which this matters:
- per-connection settings can be adjusted if MTU estimates become available
during the lifetime of the connection
- it is at least conceivable that a server might recognize restricted clients
based on range of IPs and immediately set a lower MTU for them. This is much
easier to do with a per-connection setting than by maintaining multiple
near-duplicated ssl_config objects that differ only by the MTU setting.
In ecp_mul_comb(), if (!p_eq_g && grp->T == NULL) and then ecp_precompute_comb() fails (which can
happen due to OOM), then the new array of points T will be leaked (as it's newly allocated, but
hasn't been asigned to grp->T yet).
Symptom was a memory leak in ECDHE key exchange under low memory conditions.
The basis for the Lucky 13 family of attacks is for an attacker to be able to
distinguish between (long) valid TLS-CBC padding and invalid TLS-CBC padding.
Since our code sets padlen = 0 for invalid padding, the length of the input to
the HMAC function, and the location where we read the MAC, give information
about that.
A local attacker could gain information about that by observing via a
cache attack whether the bytes at the end of the record (at the location of
would-be padding) have been read during MAC verification (computation +
comparison).
Let's make sure they're always read.
The basis for the Lucky 13 family of attacks is for an attacker to be able to
distinguish between (long) valid TLS-CBC padding and invalid TLS-CBC padding.
Since our code sets padlen = 0 for invalid padding, the length of the input to
the HMAC function gives information about that.
Information about this length (modulo the MD/SHA block size) can be deduced
from how much MD/SHA padding (this is distinct from TLS-CBC padding) is used.
If MD/SHA padding is read from a (static) buffer, a local attacker could get
information about how much is used via a cache attack targeting that buffer.
Let's get rid of this buffer. Now the only buffer used is the internal MD/SHA
one, which is always read fully by the process() function.