Files
fips/testing/static/scripts
Johnathan Corgan 6e5cb8965f Make FSP session rekey hitless under packet loss and reordering
An FSP session rekey could leave the two endpoints holding different
key sets for a brief window: if a handshake message was lost in
transit, one side rotated to the new keys while the other did not.
Traffic sealed in one key epoch then reached a peer still on the
other epoch and failed to decrypt, producing bursts of AEAD
decryption failures and dropped connectivity until a later rekey
cycle reconverged the pair. Choreographing the cutover order cannot
close this window: any fixed ordering still leaves a skew that
packet reordering widens.

Make rekey correctness independent of cutover timing by overlapping
the key epochs on the receive path. During a rekey transition the
receiver trial-decrypts each frame against every live session it
holds: current, the not-yet-promoted pending session, and the
draining previous session. The K-bit becomes a hint that orders the
trial-decrypt cascade rather than a hard gate, and a frame that
authenticates against the pending session is itself the cutover
signal. No rotation ordering and no packet reordering can then cause
a decryption failure.

The pre-rekey Noise session is held in the `previous` slot until the
peer has demonstrably moved off it. Its drain deadline is anchored
on the most recent frame the peer authenticated against that slot,
refreshed each time the trial-decrypt cascade lands there, rather
than on a fixed wall-clock timer started unilaterally at the local
cutover. A peer that never received the new keys keeps authenticating
against `previous` and the slot stays live; without this, a fixed
timer would erase the only key set that could decrypt the peer's
frames, producing a permanent silent decrypt failure on a live data
path. A peer that never catches up is handled by the existing FSP
session liveness path rather than by silent decrypt failure.

The lost-handshake liveness gap is closed separately by retransmitting
the third rekey handshake message until the peer is confirmed on the
new keys, with a bounded retry budget after which the rekey cycle is
cleanly abandoned and retried on the next timer.

Adds unit tests covering the trial-decrypt cascade (epoch selection,
promotion on pending decrypt, reordered old-epoch stragglers after
cutover, per-slot replay-window integrity), the msg3 retransmission
lifecycle, and the peer-progress-aware drain retirement.
2026-05-23 01:54:04 +00:00
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