How to check if a TCP connection is local? - c++

For a project, I need to know whether the network connection is from the local computer or from a remote computer.
How to achieve this?

This can be achieved by utilizing the getpeername and the getsockname functions.
This snipped does exactly what I need it to:
bool checkForLocalConnection(SOCKET Sock) {
sockaddr_in RemAddr, LocAddr;
int Len = sizeof(RemAddr);
getpeername(Sock, (sockaddr *)&RemAddr, &Len);
getsockname(Sock, (sockaddr *)&LocAddr, &Len);
return (RemAddr.sin_addr.S_un.S_addr == LocAddr.sin_addr.S_un.S_addr);
}
The endianess of the result is always the same, which is why you don't even have to convert it to native endianess.
Why this works and why it's necessary:
If you connect to localhost or 127.0.0.1, getpeername will always yield the address 127.0.0.1 (converted to an unsigned long, obviously).
That means, you could just check for htonl(2130706433); and be done with it (Minding the endianess). However if you enter the actual address...or any of your other local addresses your NIC might have, getpeername will return that address, instead of 127.0.0.1.
getsockname will return the local interface this socket is connected on, which means it will choose the correct interface and tell you its address, which is equal only if you're connected from a local machine.
I hope this will help someone, since I had to search forever to find that little info.
It should work for most common cases. (There are some exceptions)
List of exceptions:
Multi-Address network cards. These are on the same machine but either not on the same NIC or bound to a different IP. There isn't that much you can do about that.
Calling localhost on a different IP than 127.0.0.1. getsockname will always return 127.0.0.1, regardless of which 127.x.x.x you're calling. As a 'guard' against that, you can check specifically for the 127 in the first octet of the peer address.
Many thanks for the help with this goes to harper.

Related

How to fix 'Cannot assign requested address?'

Both the IP address and Port are confirmed not used by netstat -a -n. When I use gdb and break in the method calling bind I see that the correct IP address and Port are being used along with a reasonable socket address length of 16. This is for a UDP Listener. The remote IP is static and read from a configuration file.
This is the code,
void CSocket::Bind(IpEndPoint& endPoint)
{
int bindResult = bind( socketHandle, endPoint.GetSockAddrPtr(),
endPoint.GetAddrLength());
if(bindResult < 0)
{
TRACE_ERROR("Failed to bind to socket. %s. IpAddress %s Port %d AddrLength %d",
strerror(errno), endPoint.GetIpAddressString(),
ntohs(endPoint.GetPort()), endPoint.GetAddrLength());
this is from gdb,
Breakpoint 1, CSocket::Bind (this=0x819fa24, ipAddress="192.0.2.77",
port=4185) at Socket.cpp:126
and this is the TRACE_ERROR from the code above
ERROR: Failed to bind to socket. errno 99 (Cannot assign requested address).
IpAddress 192.0.2.77 Port 4185 AddrLength 16
I've been re-reading Beej's Guide to Network Programming but not finding a clue. This is UDP so a connection should not be required to bind. The firewall is off. Where else should I be looking?
Following on what #Aconcagua said: You want to bind an address that is local (not one that's "not in use"). You can't just make up a local address. You either use INADDR_ANY to bind to any address, or you need to bind one that is assigned to one of your local interfaces. This is likely the problem. (bind sets the local address, connect sets the remote address -- or, with UDP, you can specify the remote address per packet with sendto.) – Gil Hamilton

Receiving Data for Multiple Hosts via Linux Sockets

I have a rather strange question. Lately, I have been tasked with developing software to simulate a large (hundreds of nodes and up) network. To make a long story short, we have a head-end server that communicates with each host through a predictable IP addressing scheme via Linux sockets using a mixture of broadcast and unicast. The head-end will issue a request to a given client and will (sometimes) receive data pertaining to the command executed. All data / commands are sent via UDP on a well-defined port.
Now, for testing purposes, we would like to use the original server binary in a virtual environment an still receive reasonable data. For example, we would like to issue a reset command to a particular node and receive a fake notification back. The broadcast bit is easy, as I simply have to listen in on the proper broadcast address and act accordingly. The unicast is what has me stuck.
The Question
Is it possible to receive UDP requests for a large number of discrete hosts via a single (or a reduced) number of Linux sockets? All hosts are on the same subnet and all IP addresses / hosts / network topology are known ahead of time.
Desired Output
Ultimately, we would like to have an app that runs on a host on the network and responds as if it were each of these discrete 'virtualized' hosts based on input datagrams.
Do note that I am not asking for someone to write me a program. I am just simply looking for some direction as to the 'vehicle' by which this can be accomplished.
Possible Solutions
RAW Sockets: This has promise as I can trap all inbound data via a
single socket and punt it off to a worker thread for processing and
response. Unfortunately, I only receive packets that are
destined for my host IP and none of the 'fake' IPs.
Abuse IP aliases on Linux, one for each host: This seems to be the most direct approach but it feels like duck hunting with a bazooka. It has the added benefit of appearing to 'be' the host for any other forms of communication, I just worry that creating 400+ aliases might be a bit much for our bastard-child of a Linux environment. As an added complication, the hosts do change based on configuration and can be in any manner of states (up, down, command processing, etc.).
The source code of the server is to be treated as immutable for the purpose of our testing. I fully expect this will be impossible with the constraints given, but someone may have an idea of how to accomplish this as, quite frankly, I have never done anything of this sort before.
Thank you in advance for any assistance.
Personally, I would use your second option - add all the IP addresses to the host, then bind to INADDR_ANY address. This would mean you could use just one socket.
An alternative is to set the IP_TRANSPARENT socket option on your socket, which will then allow your application to bind to non-local addresses (you would route the networks containing those addresses through the machine that your application is running on). This method does require one socket per address, though.
So, using a combination of both of caf's solutions, I was able to have my cake and eat it too. I was also heavily influenced by
Python/iptables: Capturing all UDP packets and their original destination
which is a Python example, but does show how I can 'cheat' the packets back to a single interface, negating the need for maintenance of many sockets. That question is well worth the read and contains a lot of good information. For compactness, though, I will restate part of it below.
Hopefully it can help someone else down the road.
Part 1 - Host Configuration
As stated in the above question, we can use a combination of iptables and ip routes to redirect the packets to loopback for processing. This was not stated in my original question, but it is acceptable for the 'simulator' to run on the head-end host itself and not be a discrete node on the network. To do this, we mark each packet via iptables and then route it to lo based on said mark.
iptables -A OUTPUT -t mangle -p udp --dport 27333 -j MARK --set-mark 1
ip rule add fwmark 1 lookup 100
ip route add local 0.0.0.0/0 dev lo table 100
In my case, I only need traffic to a certain port so my iptables rule has been adjusted accordingly from the original.
Part 2 - Software
As caf stated in his post, the real trick is to use IP_TRANSPARENT and a raw socket. Raw sockets are necessary in order to get the original source / destination IP addresses. One gotchya that took me a while was the use of IPPROTO_UDP in the call to socket(). Even though this is a raw socket, it will strip out the Ethernet header. A lot of code online shows the calculation of the IP header offset using something similar to the following:
struct iphdr* ipHeader = (struct iphdr *)(buf + sizeof(ethhdr));
Offsetting by ethhdr (which is stripped) will give you some rather entertaining garbage data. With that particular header removed, the necessary IP header is simply the first structure in the buffer.
The Test Code
Below you will find a proof-of-concept example. It is no way fully functional or complete. In particular, no checking in done on the incoming packets for malicious data (ex. format string exploits in the payload, pointer math problems, malformed / malicious packets, etc).
Note that the code binds to lo specifically. This does not mean that we will only get packets destined for one of our 'fake' hosts (other services use loobpack, too). Additional checking / filtering is required to get only the packets we want.
#include <arpa/inet.h>
#include <netinet/if_ether.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <netinet/ip.h>
#include <netinet/udp.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
//Set up listening socket
struct sockaddr_in serverAddr;
struct iphdr* ipHeader;
struct udphdr* udpHeader;
int listenSock = 0;
char data[65536];
static int is_transparent = 1;
std::string device = "lo";
//Initialize listening socket
if ((listenSock = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_RAW, IPPROTO_UDP)) < 0) {
printf("Error creating socket\n");
return 1;
}
setsockopt(listenSock, SOL_IP, IP_TRANSPARENT, &is_transparent, sizeof(is_transparent));
setsockopt(listensock, SOL_SOCKET, SO_BINDTO_DEVICE, device.c_str(), device.size());
memset(&serverAddr, 0x00, sizeof(serverAddr));
memset(&data, 0x00, sizeof(data));
//Setup server address
serverAddr.sin_family = AF_INET;
serverAddr.sin_addr.s_addr = htonl(INADDR_ANY);
serverAddr.sin_port = htons(27333);
//Bind and listen
if (bind(listenSock, (struct sockaddr *) &serverAddr, sizeof(serverAddr)) < 0) {
printf("Error binding socket\n");
return 1;
}
while (1) {
//Accept connection
recv(listenSock, data, 65536, 0);
//Get IP header
ipHeader = (struct iphdr*)(data);
//Only grab UDP packets (17 is the magic number for UDP protocol)
if ((unsigned int)ipHeader->protocol == 17) {
//Get UDP header information
udpHeader = (struct udphdr*)(data + (ipHeader->ihl * 4));
//DEBUG
struct sockaddr_in tempDest;
struct sockaddr_in tempSource;
char* payload = (char*)(data + ipHeader->ihl * 4) + sizeof(struct udphdr));
memset(&tempSource, 0x00, sizeof(tempSource));
memset(&tempDest, 0x00, sizeof(tempDest));
tempSource.sin_addr.s_addr = ipHeader->saddr;
tempDest.sin_addr.s_addr = ipHeader->daddr;
printf("Datagram received\n");
printf("Source IP: %s\n", inet_ntoa(tempSource.sin_addr));
printf("Dest IP : %s\n", inet_ntoa(tempDest.sin_addr));
printf("Data : %s\n", payload);
printf("Port : %d\n\n", ntohs(udpHeader->dest));
}
}
}
Further Reading
Some very helpful links are below.
http://www.binarytides.com/packet-sniffer-code-in-c-using-linux-sockets-bsd-part-2/
http://bert-hubert.blogspot.com/2012/10/on-binding-datagram-udp-sockets-to-any.html

Nothing received from recvfrom on windows

I have some problems on Windows 8 using recvfrom. I have a socket which is bound to INADDR_ANY (0.0.0.0), and i'd like to receive some packets on it.
The problem is that I see those packets in Wireshark, but recvfrom never tells me that the received size is greater than 0. I've tried biding the socket to 127.0.0.1 or even to my local IPv4 address, I never get anything. The port used is 7321 (locally)
I use the ENet library for the creation of the socket, and then I used that socket in recvfrom. Here's the code that never returns the expected packets.
uint8_t* buffer; // max size needed normally (only used for stun)
buffer = (uint8_t*)(malloc(sizeof(uint8_t)*2048));
memset(buffer, 0, 2048);
socklen_t from_len;
struct sockaddr addr;
from_len = sizeof(addr);
int len = recvfrom(m_host->socket, (char*)buffer, 2048, 0, &addr, &from_len); //m_host is of type ENetHost, the socket in it is a file descriptor like standard sockets
As I said, it's a bit weird as Wireshark shows me the packets (which are STUN responses if you want to know).
Can someone help me find out what is missing that may be causing this issue?
Your addr variable is declared as a sockaddr. It needs to be declared as a sockaddr_in (works with IPv4 only) or SOCKADDR_STORAGE (works with both IPv4 and IPv6), and then typecast it to sockaddr* when passing it to recvfrom().
Aside from that, you say that recvfrom() is not returning >= 0. So what is it actually returning? If it returns 0, then a 0-length packet was received (impossible for TCP, but possible for UDP). If it returns -1 (aka SOCKET_ERROR), then an error occured so use WSAGetLastError() to find out what that error actually is.
I can think of 2 possible reasons you are having the problem:
1) You might not have the port correct on your sendto & recvfrom socket. So say you are sending packets to port 6000, but your recvfrom is listening on port 6001 or something. Just double check both programs are using the same port.
2) Windows firewall. I would run the program as an admin just to be safe, but also make sure you allow your program through windows firewall to communicate using private or public networks.

How to get Current System IP in C under Windows XP [duplicate]

For a communication between two hosts, I need to send the IP address of my host to the other site. The problem is that if I request my IP address, it might be that I get back my local loopback IP addres (127.x.x.x) , not the network (ethernet) IP address.
I use the following code:
char myhostname[32];
gethostname(myhostname, 32);
hp = gethostbyname(myhostname);
unsigned my_ip = *(unsigned*)(hp->h_addr);
if( (my_ip % 256) == 127) {
/* Wrong IP adress as it's 127.x.x.x */
printf("Error, local IP address!");
return;
}
The only way to solve it is to make sure my hostname in /etc/hosts is behind the real network address, not the local loopback (the default for e.g. Ubuntu).
Is there a way to solve this without relying on the content of /etc/hosts?
Edit: I changed the above code so it makes use of getaddrinfo, but I still get back the loopback device's number (127.0,0,1) instead of the real IP address:
struct addrinfo hint = {0};
struct addrinfo *aip = NULL;
unsigned ip = 0;
struct sockaddr_in *sinp = NULL;
hint.ai_family = AF_INET; /* IPv4 */
hint.ai_socktype = SOCK_STREAM;
if(getaddrinfo(hostname, NULL, &hint, &aip) != 0) {
return 0;
}
sinp = (struct sockaddr_in *) aip->ai_addr;
ip = *(unsigned *) &sinp->sin_addr;
(I used to get back a list of 3 addrinfo's with the three SOCK_STREAM,SOCK_DGRAM and SOCK_RAW, but the hint prevents that)
So my question still stands...
There is POSIX function getaddrinfo() that returns linked list of addresses for given hostname, so you just need to go through that list and find non-loopback address.
See man getaddrinfo.
Not an answer, but a relevant comment: be aware that as soon as you start sending addressing information in the content of packets, you run the risk of making your application unable to work across NAT:ing routers and/or through firewalls.
These technologies rely on the information in IP packet headers to keep track of the traffic, and if applications exchange addressing information inside packets, where they remain invisible to this inspection, they might break.
Of course, this might be totally irrelevant to your application, but I thought it worth pointing out in this context.
The originating address will be included in the packet sent... there's no need to duplicate this information. It's obtained when accepting the communication from the remote host (see beej's guide to networking, specifically the part on accept())
I just ran into a situation where when only /etc/hosts has information in it and when I used getaddrinfo to get the IP address list, it returned 127.0.0.1 each time. As it turned out, the hostname was aliased to localhost...something often easy to overlook. Here's what happened:
The /etc/hosts file:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost foo
::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
172.16.1.248 foo
172.16.1.249 bie
172.16.1.250 bletch
So, now, when you call getaddrinfo with host="foo", it returns 127.0.0.1 3 times. The error here, is that foo appears both on the line with "127.0.0.1" and "172.16.1.248". Once I removed foo from the line with "127.0.0.1" things worked fine.
Hope this helps someone.
Look at this:
Discovering public IP programmatically
Note that in some cases a computer can have more than one non-loopback IP address, and in that case the answers to that question tell you how to get the one that is exposed to the internet.
Even if the computer has only one physical network interface (an assumption that may or may not hold, even netbooks have two - ethernet and WLAN), VPNs can add even more IP adresses. Anyway, the host on the other side should be able to determine the IP your host used to contact it.
Use getaddrinfo()
You're almost there. I'm not sure how you're getting my_ip from hp.
gethostbyname() returns a pointer to a hostent structure which has an h_addr_list field.
The h_addr_list field is a null-terminated list of all the ip addresses bound to that host.
I think you're getting the loopback address because it's the first entry in h_addr_list.
EDIT: It should work something like this:
gethostname(myhostname, 32);
hp = gethostbyname(myhostname);
unsigned my_ip = *(unsigned*)(hp->h_addr);
for (int i = 0; hp->h_addr_list[i] != 0; ++i) {
if (hp->h_addr_list[i] != INADDR_LOOPBACK) {
// hp->addr_list[i] is a non-loopback address
}
}
// no address found
If /etc/hosts is still there and still the same, looking for all entries of h_addr_list won't help.
Your new code hardwires the use of IPv4 (in the hint.ai_family field) which is a terrible idea.
Apart from that, you're close, you just should loop through the results of getaddrinfo. Your code just gets the first IP address but there is an aip->ai_next field to follow...
struct addrinfo {
...
struct addrinfo *ai_next; /* next structure in linked list */
};

Why would connect() give EADDRNOTAVAIL?

I have in my application a failure that arose which does not seem to be reproducible. I have a TCP socket connection which failed and the application tried to reconnect it. In the second call to connect() attempting to reconnect, I got an error result with errno == EADDRNOTAVAIL which the man page for connect() says means: "The specified address is not available from the local machine."
Looking at the call to connect(), the second argument appears to be the address to which the error is referring to, but as I understand it, this argument is the TCP socket address of the remote host, so I am confused about the man page referring to the local machine. Is it that this address to the remote TCP socket host is not available from my local machine? If so, why would this be? It had to have succeeded calling connect() the first time before the connection failed and it attempted to reconnect and got this error. The arguments to connect() were the same both times.
Would this error be a transient one which, if I had tried calling connect again might have gone away if I waited long enough? If not, how should I try to recover from this failure?
Check this link
http://www.toptip.ca/2010/02/linux-eaddrnotavail-address-not.html
EDIT: Yes I meant to add more but had to cut it there because of an emergency
Did you close the socket before attempting to reconnect? Closing will tell the system that the socketpair (ip/port) is now free.
Here are additional items too look at:
If the local port is already connected to the given remote IP and port (i.e., there's already an identical socketpair), you'll receive this error (see bug link below).
Binding a socket address which isn't the local one will produce this error. if the IP addresses of a machine are 127.0.0.1 and 1.2.3.4, and you're trying to bind to 1.2.3.5 you are going to get this error.
EADDRNOTAVAIL: The specified address is unavailable on the remote machine or the address field of the name structure is all zeroes.
Link with a bug similar to yours (answer is close to the bottom)
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4294599
It seems that your socket is basically stuck in one of the TCP internal states and that adding a delay for reconnection might solve your problem as they seem to have done in that bug report.
This can also happen if an invalid port is given, like 0.
If you are unwilling to change the number of temporary ports available (as suggested by David), or you need more connections than the theoretical maximum, there are two other methods to reduce the number of ports in use. However, they are to various degrees violations of the TCP standard, so they should be used with care.
The first is to turn on SO_LINGER with a zero-second timeout, forcing the TCP stack to send a RST packet and flush the connection state. There is one subtlety, however: you should call shutdown on the socket file descriptor before you close, so that you have a chance to send a FIN packet before the RST packet. So the code will look something like:
shutdown(fd, SHUT_RDWR);
struct linger linger;
linger.l_onoff = 1;
linger.l_linger = 0;
// todo: test for error
setsockopt(fd, SOL_SOCKET, SO_LINGER,
(char *) &linger, sizeof(linger));
close(fd);
The server should only see a premature connection reset if the FIN packet gets reordered with the RST packet.
See TCP option SO_LINGER (zero) - when it's required for more details. (Experimentally, it doesn't seem to matter where you set setsockopt.)
The second is to use SO_REUSEADDR and an explicit bind (even if you're the client), which will allow Linux to reuse temporary ports when you run, before they are done waiting. Note that you must use bind with INADDR_ANY and port 0, otherwise SO_REUSEADDR is not respected. Your code will look something like:
int opts = 1;
// todo: test for error
setsockopt(fd, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR,
(char *) &opts, sizeof(int));
struct sockaddr_in listen_addr;
listen_addr.sin_family = AF_INET;
listen_addr.sin_port = 0;
listen_addr.sin_addr.s_addr = INADDR_ANY;
// todo: test for error
bind(fd, (struct sockaddr *) &listen_addr, sizeof(listen_addr));
// todo: test for addr
// saddr is the struct sockaddr_in you're connecting to
connect(fd, (struct sockaddr *) &saddr, sizeof(saddr));
This option is less good because you'll still saturate the internal kernel data structures for TCP connections as per netstat -an | grep -e tcp -e udp | wc -l. However, you won't start reusing ports until this happens.
I got this issue. I got it resolve by enabling tcp timestamp.
Root cause:
After connection close, Connections will go in TIME_WAIT state for some
time.
During this state if any new connections comes with same IP and PORT,
if SO_REUSEADDR is not provided during socket creation then socket bind()
will fail with error EADDRINUSE.
But even though after providing SO_REUSEADDR also sockect connect() may
fail with error EADDRNOTAVAIL if tcp timestamp is not enable on both side.
Solution:
Please enable tcp timestamp on both side client and server.
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps
Reason to enable tcp_timestamp:
When we enable tcp_tw_reuse, sockets in TIME_WAIT state can be used before they expire, and the kernel will try to make sure that there is no collision regarding TCP sequence numbers. If we enable tcp_timestamps, it will make sure that those collisions cannot happen. However, we need TCP timestamps to be enabled on both ends. See the definition of tcp_twsk_unique for the gory details.
reference:
https://serverfault.com/questions/342741/what-are-the-ramifications-of-setting-tcp-tw-recycle-reuse-to-1
Another thing to check is that the interface is up. I got confused by this one recently while using network namespaces, since it seems creating a new network namespace produces an entirely independent loopback interface but doesn't bring it up (at least, with Debian wheezy's versions of things). This escaped me for a while since one doesn't typically think of loopback as ever being down.