how to get icmp on udp socket on UNIX - c

Getting raw sockets requires root privilege, and tcp/udp doesn't have it,
so I need to know how to get a udp socket and fetch icmp data.
The programming language is C and the OS is BSD-like.
(In other words I want to write a ping without root privilege)

You can write an UDP ping without root privileges.
When the IP_RECVERR option is enabled, all errors are stored in the
socket error queue, and can be received by recvmsg(2) with the
MSG_ERRQUEUE flag set.
See the UDP manual.
I assume the forge&send routine is already implemented on a SOCK_DGRAM socket.
Then, to access the source addresses of the ICMP messages:
Set the socket options to receive errors (IP_RECVERR)
Make a call to recvmsg() on the error queue (MSG_ERRQUEUE)
Parse the returned structures (msghdr and iovec), it contains the source addresses of ICMP issuers.

UDP is an OSI layer four protocoll, so is ICMP. Thereby, you can't implement ICMP on an UDP socket since its layer four protocoll is already fixed to UDP. You can consider writing an implementation that requires the privilege to open a raw socket. Then you either give the application or your account the right capability or flip the executables SUID bit to make it run as root.

So, uh, it it was trivial to go around the requirement, do you think it would still be there?
It's meant to provide some security, so it's not super-easy to go around.
I don't think it can be done.

Related

How do I read ICMP response from a port after sending an udp request without using raw socket

I tried using SOCK_RAW, but it needs sudo permission.
Is there a way I could do it without sudo permission.
I followed this link
You need root (or equivalent capabilities) to open a raw socket and read arbitrary network packets not associated with a connection you own. However, it's possible to get the useful information from the ICMP error response back through the UDP socket, as an error status interpreted by the kernel. I don't really understand how the interfaces for doing this work, but you can find some information starting from the udp(7) man page.

UDP - Multi-server single client

I have a linux computer with a code in C that must communicate in UDP with 4 differents equipments. The computer sends differents commands to each equipment and receives responses, sometimes in parallel ...
I am a perfect beginner, and managed to communicate with one equipment using UDP socket. But now, i'm looking for a way to communicate with all these equipments, what i would like to call "multiple socket", but i don't know where to look/ what word to search to find a way ...
My linux computer is the client and all the equipment servers. I only have one eth port on the computer and will have to use a switch to have access to all the equipment. I would like to create functions like :
sendcmd(IPnumber, PORTnumber, cmd , ...)
readbuff(IPnumber, PORTnumber, buff, ...)
so i can choose which IP will received cmd ... i don't know if it's possible or if i need to open the socket, then close and redo the operation with another IP ...
So, if I ever managed to make myself understood, where should I look for a solution to my problem?
Thank you !
You can use a single UDP socket for your scenario. You can keep the socket open for the lifetime of your application.
UDP is not connection oriented. UDP sockets are also not classified into client sockets and server sockets. UDP sockets are always bound to a local port, either implicitly (typically for pure clients) or explicitly (which is usually the case for servers). In your case you do not care about the port for your UDP client.
To send to your four UDP server you can use sendto(). This lets you specify the destination IP address and port the UDP packet gets sent to.
To receive from your four UDP servers you can use recvfrom(). This will tell the IP address and port where the UDP packet came from.
You most likely want to have a receive loop of some kind. If you want to do anything else in your application you most likely want to either make recvfrom() non-blocking or you want to have the receive loop in its own thread. But this goes beyond your question.
The most important aspect of UDP is that it is not a protocol (despite its name which is misleading). It is one puzzle piece for a protocol. It is a tool to develop your own protocol. But I assume you already have a specific protocol at hand defined by your peripherals.

When using PF_PACKET type of socket, what does PACKET_ADD_MEMBERSHIP?

When using a PF_PACKET type of socket with protocol type ETH_P_IP, the man packet documentation talks about a socket option for multicast. The socket option is PACKET_ADD_MEMBERSHIP.
Assuming you use PACKET_ADD_MEMBERSHIP socket option on a PF_PACKET socket correctly, what features and benefits and use cases is this socket option for?
Right now I receive all incoming IP packets so I look at each packet to see if it has the correct IP dst-address and UDP dst-port and I skip over all the other packets. Would using PACKET_ADD_MEMBERSHIP socket option mean I don't need to do my own filter because the kernel or driver would filter for me?
I dug into the linux-kernel source and traced down the code a little bit. I found that the ethernet-mac-address you pass in via setsockopt() is added to a list of ethernet-mac-addresses. And then the list is sent to the network-device hardware to do something... but I can't find any authoritative documentation telling me what happens next.
My educated guess is that the ethernet-mac-address list is used by the hardware to filter at the layer-2 ethernet protocol (i.e. the hardware only accepts packets that have a destination ethernet-address that matches one on the list). If there is some good documentation I would welcome that.
(I'm more familiar with TCP/UDP sockets and so this looks very similar to AF_INET type of socket's IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP socket option... so I was expecting IGMP reports to be generated which would start multicast traffic from the router... but I found out experimentally that no IGMP reports are generated when you use this socket option.)
Your guess is correct. PACKET_ADD_MEMBERSHIP should add addresses to the NIC's hardware filter. As you've surmised, it's intended to allow you to receive multicasts for a number of different addresses without incurring the load(*) of full promiscuous mode.
(* With modern full duplex ethernet, there's generally not a lot of traffic coming to the NIC that it wouldn't want to receive anyway, unless it's in a virtualized environment.)
Note that there is also a separate PACKET_MR_UNICAST which does not appear in the packet(7) man page but works analogously. I would use the appropriate one (unicast vs multicast) for the type of address you're filtering on, as it's conceivable (though unlikely) that a driver would refuse to put a unicast address into the multicast filtering table.
All that being said, you'll still need to keep your software filtering as backup. There are some older drivers that don't implement MAC filtering at all (particularly for multiple unicast addresses). The core kernel or the driver handles this by simply turning on promiscuous mode if the feature isn't available.
As for the relationship with IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP, the IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP code will automatically construct the appropriate multicast MAC address and add it to the interface. See ip_mc_filter_add.

How to bind a Raw Socket to a specific port?

I am currently working on a programming assignment. The assignment is to implement a client,network emulator, and server. The client passes packets to a network emulator, and the network emulator passes to the server. Vice-versa applies as well. The prerequisite for the assignment is that I may only use raw sockets. So I will create my own IP and UDP headers. I have tested my packets with wireshark. They are all correct and in the proper format(it reads them properly).
Another requirement is that the emulator, client and server all have specific ports they must be bound to. Now, I do not understand how to bind a raw socket to a specific port. All my raw sockets receive all traffic on the host address they are bound to. According to man pages, and everywhere else on the internet, including "Unix Network Programming" by Richard Stevens, this is how they are supposed to work. My teacher has not responded to any of my emails and I probably will not be able to ask him until Tuesday.I see two options in front of me. First I can use libpcap to filter from a specific device and then output to my raw socket. I feel this is way out of scope for our assignment though. Or I can filter them after I receive them from the socket. This apparently has a lot of overhead because all the packets are being copied/moved through the kernel. At least, that is my understanding(please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong).
So my question is:
Is their an option or something I can set for this? Where the raw socket will bind to a port? Have I missed something obvious?
Thank you for your time.
--
The man page for raw(7) says:
A raw socket can be bound to a specific local address using the bind(2) call. If it isn't bound all packets with the specified IP protocol are received. In addition a RAW socket can be bound to a specific network device using SO_BINDTODEVICE; see socket(7).
Edit: You cannot bind a raw socket to a specific port because "port" is a concept in TCP and UDP, not IP. Look at the header diagrams for those three protocols and it should become obvious: you are working at a lower level, where the concept of port is not known.
I would think you're expected to filter the packets in your software. It sounds like the exercise is to learn what the different components of the IP stack do by recreating a simplified piece of it in user space. Normally in the kernel, the IP code would process all packets, verify the IP headers, reassemble fragments, and check the protocol field. If the protocol field is 17 (udp), then it passes it to the UDP code (every UDP packet). It's up to the UDP code to then validate the UDP header and determine if any applications are interested in them based on the destination port.
I imagine your project is expected to more or less mimic this process. Obviously none of it will be as efficient as doing it in the kernel, but since the assignment is to write (part of) an IP stack in user-space, I'd guess efficiency isn't the point of the exercise.

Filtering UDP loopback on Linux in C

I have an application bound to eth0, sending UDP packets on port A to 255.255.255.255. At the same time, I have a UDP server bound to eth0, 0.0.0.0 and port A.
What I want to do is to make sure that the server won't receive messages generated by the application (handled purely in software by the kernel) but it will receive messages generated by other hosts in the network.
I can't change the payload of UDP packets nor add any headers to it.
I've already implemented a solution using RTNETLINK to fetch all IP addresses of the machine I'm sitting on (and filter basing on address from recvfrom()), but I'm wondering if there might be a simpler and cleaner solution.
EDIT: I thought about something like tagging the skb - the tag would disappear after leaving a physical interface, but wouldn't if it's just routed in the software.
Any ideas?
If you can patch your Linux kernel, you could use a setsockopt() option for choosing if you want to loopback the broadcast packets you're sending or not.
This patch reuse the IP_MULTICAST_LOOP option exactly for this purpose.
Also, instead of "messing" with the IP_MULTICAST_LOOP option, you could easily add your own setsockopt() option, maybe called IP_BROADCAST_NO_LOOP. This would guarantee that you're not changing the behavior for any other application.
You can compute a checksum or CRC (better) over the payload and filter against this.
You can do this at the firewall level by dropping packets to broadcast address port A with source address of the eth0.

Resources