Files
tailscale/control
Brad Fitzpatrick 8344d97054 control/controlclient,control/ts2021,util/httpbody: bound control response sizes
The map response reader now caps a single message at 256 MiB on the wire
and 1 GiB after zstd decompression. The server-chosen uint32 size prefix
previously let a malicious control server make us allocate up to 4 GiB
before reading any body bytes, and the decoded size was unbounded, so a
small zstd frame could expand into gigabytes of JSON. A 16 MB cap has
been hit by real production traffic before, so both limits sit far above
plausible legitimate sizes. The size-prefixed read moved into a
readMapResponseMessage helper, and the newer control/tsp path already
enforced both kinds of bounds; this brings the long-poll path it
replaces in line, with more generous limits for large tailnets.

ts2021.Client.Do additionally caps every noise response body with
httpbody.LimitSize, so a malicious or buggy control server can't make us
buffer an unbounded response. Client.Do shadows the embedded
http.Client's Do method, so register, set-dns, set-device-attr,
audit-log, all DoNoiseRequest consumers (webclient, tailnet lock, SSH
actions, id-token, feature queries), and the debug CLI get the cap
without per-call-site changes, and future noise endpoints get it for
free.

The cap lives in the new util/httpbody package so other HTTP clients can
adopt the same convention: LimitSize looks the size limit up from
res.Request's context (a Response knows the Request that produced it),
falling back to DefaultMaxSize, 1 MiB, when the context carries no
override. It is like io.LimitReader except that reads past the limit
fail with an error wrapping httpbody.ErrTooLarge instead of silently
truncating, and a body of at most the limit, including one of exactly
the limit, reads back without error: the wrapper probes for EOF once the
limit is exhausted to tell an exactly-at-limit body from an oversize
one. The per-request override, httpbody.WithMaxSize, is a context key,
so transports pick it up with no API changes; LimitSizeTo applies an
explicit limit ignoring any override. Repeated LimitSize or LimitSizeTo
calls replace the previous limit rather than compounding it, so a later
call can raise or remove the limit an earlier one set.

Responses that stream an unbounded number of individually bounded
messages disable the cap with httpbody.WithMaxSize(ctx, 0): the
/machine/map long-poll and control/tsp's map session, whose messages are
already capped per-message (by readMapResponseMessage and decodeMsg, and
by tsp's framedReader and boundedReader). Their non-200 error bodies are
not message streams, so those are capped with LimitSizeTo instead.

The tailnet lock /tka/init/begin, /tka/sync/offer and /tka/affected-sigs
responses can carry per-node key signatures or missing AUMs, which at
100,000 peers reach tens of MB, so they raise the cap to 512 MiB. The
per-response io.LimitedReader decoders that silently truncated those
responses at 1 or 10 MiB are removed: the transport cap is now the
single enforcement point, and it reports oversize bodies instead of
truncating them.

The /key fetch over plain TLS switches from io.LimitReader to
httpbody.LimitSizeTo, so an oversized response reports the problem
instead of producing a confusing truncated-JSON error.

Thanks to Ben Carman for the report!

Updates tailscale/corp#48187

Reported-by: Ben Carman
Change-Id: Ibf95e1ab9e4f0d7ef8866e8c26e62ed2a514455a
Signed-off-by: Brad Fitzpatrick <bradfitz@tailscale.com>
2026-09-14 18:58:41 -07:00
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