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authorClara Engler <cve@cve.cx>2026-01-01 13:51:14 +0100
committerJakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>2026-01-05 16:15:50 -0800
commit48a4aa9d9c393abf122454bc9050aac15de6d27f (patch)
treebec023b8e1796b2e86fb7a69f7af329d7aabe8ac /rust
parentc303e8b86d9dbd6868f5216272973292f7f3b7f1 (diff)
ipv4: Improve martian logs
At the current moment, the logs for martian packets are as follows: ``` martian source {DST} from {SRC}, on dev {DEV} martian destination {DST} from {SRC}, dev {DEV} ``` These messages feel rather hard to understand in production, especially the "martian source" one, mostly because it is grammatically ambitious to parse which part is now the source address and which part is the destination address. For example, "{DST}" may there be interpreted as the actual source address due to following the word "source", thereby implying the actual source address to be the destination one. Personally, I discovered this bug while toying around with TUN interfaces and using them as a tunnel (receiving packets via a TUN interface and sending them over a TCP stream; receiving packets from a TCP stream and writing them to a TUN).[^1] When these IP addresses contained local IPs (i.e. 10.0.0.0/8 in source and destination), everything worked fine. However, sending them to a real routable IP address on the internet led to them being treated as a martian packet, obviously. Using a few sysctl(8) and iptables(8) settings[^2] fixed it, but while debugging I found the log message starting with "martian source" rather confusing, as I was unsure on whether the packet that gets dropped was the packet originating from me or the response from the endpoint, as "martian source <ROUTABLE IP>" could also be falsely interpreted as the response packet being martian, due to the word "source" followed by the routable IP address, implying the source address of that packet is set to this IP, as explained above. In the end, I had to look into the source code of the kernel on where this error message gets generated, which is usually an indicator of there being room for improvement with regard to this error message. In terms of improvement, this commit changes the error messages for martian source and martian destination packets as follows: ``` martian source (src={SRC}, dst={DST}, dev={DEV}) martian destination (src={SRC}, dst={DST}, dev={DEV}) ``` These new wordings leave pretty much no room for ambiguity as all parameters are prefixed with a respective key explaining their semantic meaning. See also the following thread on LKML.[^3] [^1]: <https://backreference.org/2010/03/26/tuntap-interface-tutorial> [^2]: sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 && \ iptables -A INPUT -i tun0 -j ACCEPT && \ iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE [^3]: <https://lore.kernel.org/all/aSd4Xj8rHrh-krjy@4944566b5c925f79/> Signed-off-by: Clara Engler <cve@cve.cx> Reviewed-by: David Ahern <dsahern@kernel.org> Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260101125114.2608-1-cve@cve.cx Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
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