Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Network namespaces and NetworkManager

This post documents a process to implement support for network namespaces in the NetworkManager. The code described in the post can be found on GitHub. While my personal motivation to add namespace support to NetworkManager was to be able to add support for provisioning domains as specified by IETF MIF WG, it also brings benefits to existing users by allowing isolation of different applications into different network namespaces. The best example is a VPN connection isolation. When network namespaces are used then certain applications can be started in namespace in which only network connectivity is via VPN. Those applications can access VPN resources while all the other applications, that are in different network namespaces, will not see VPN connection and thus couldn't use them. The additional benefit would be from using multiple connections, as described by MIF Architecture RFC.

Note that after I started to work on this, Thomas Haller implemented basic support for namespaces in NetworkManager that was a bit different in some implementation details from mine.

The idea


The intention of implementing support for network namespaces was to allow applications to be isolated so that they use specific network connections. Network namespaces in Linux kernel have some properties that anyone that wants to use them must be aware of. This is documented in a separate post.

So, an application can not be moved between different network namespace by some other application, i.e. only application itself can change network namespaces, and only if it has appropriate permissions.

So, the idea is the following one. Application is started in some network namespace. This can be done easily (e.g. see 'ip netns exec' command). Then, this network namespace is manipulated by either the application itself - it is aware of NM's support for network namespaces, or by third party application (that application could be nmcli). The manipulation means that requests are sent to NetworkManager via D-Bus to make changes to network namespace. The changes can be activation and deactivation of certain connections. NetworkManager, based on those requests and on specifics of connections and devices those connections are bound to, determines what to do. For example, it can create virtual device in the network namespace, or can move physical device. Basically, this part isn't important to the application itself, the only thing that is important is that the application is assigned requested connections.

Implementation


The following changes were made to NetworkManager in order to introduce support for network namespaces:

  1. Created new object NMNetnsController whose purpose is to allow management of all network namespaces controlled by NetworkManager. Via the interface org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.NetworkNamespacesController it is possible to create a new network namespace, or to remove the existing one. It is also possible to obtain a list of existing network namespaces.
     
  2. Created new object NMNetns that represents a single network namespace. So, when new network namespace is created a new object NMNetns is created and exposed on D-Bus. This object allows manipulation with network namespace via the interface org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.NetNsInstance. So, it is possible to get a list of all devices within the network namespace, take certain device from some other network namespace and to activate some connection.
     
  3. NMSettings is now singleton object. This wasn't so significant change because there was also one object of this type before, but now it is more explicitly exposed as such.
     
  4. NMPlatform, NMDefaultRouteManager and NMRouteManager aren't singleton objects any more. They are now instantiated for each new network namespace that is created.


VPN isolation


VPN isolation was done as a first user of network namespaces implementation. It was easier then other connections because the assumption was that VPN connection should live only in single network namespace and it should be the only available connection.

At the beginning, there was doubt on where to place the knowledge of network namespace and two places were candidates, in NMActiveConnection and NMVPNConnection classes. NMActiveConnection is actually a base class of NMVPNConnection class. The modification of NMVPNConnection approach is better for the following reason because the idea was to introduce new configuration parameter in the configuration file of a VPN connection that will specify that isolation is necessary and also some additional behaviors:
  • netns-isolate

    Boolean parameter (yes/no) which defines weather VPN connection should be isolated within a network namespace or not. For backwards compatibility reasons
     
  • netns-persistent

    Should network namespace be persistant (yes) or not (no). Persistant namespace will be retained when VPN connection is terminated, while non-persistant will be removed.
     
  • netns-name

    Network namespace name. Special value is uuid which means connection's UUID should be used, also name is special value that requests connection's name to be used. Finally, any other string is taken as-is and used as a network namespace name.
     
  • netns-timeout

    How much time to wait (in milliseconds) for device to appear in target namespace.
Basically, the implementation is such that when device appears in root network namespace it is taken from there (using TakeDevice method, but called directly instead via D-Bus).  When device appears in the target network namespace network parameters are assigned to the interface. This was tested with OpenVPN type of VPN.

The implementation has two problems. First, the case of VPN connections that don't create virtual devices but instead just modify packet processing rules in the Linux kernel (i.e. XFRM). Secondly, hostname and name resolution parameters aren't assigned because the infrastructure is lacking in that respect.

Conclusion


The initial goal of having network namespaces support in NetworkManager was achieved. There are functionalities missing like isolation of any connection, hostname handling and DNS resolution handling. Those are things that will have to be resolved in the future.

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scientist, consultant, security specialist, networking guy, system administrator, philosopher ;)

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