185 lines
9.6 KiB
Markdown
185 lines
9.6 KiB
Markdown
This project currently aims to support Android, musl and glibc. It may support
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other non-Linux operating systems in the future. For Android and musl, there
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will be custom integration and other hardening features. The glibc support will
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be limited to replacing the malloc implementation because musl is a much more
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robust and cleaner base to build on and can cover the same use cases.
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Debian stable determines the most ancient set of supported dependencies:
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* glibc 2.24
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* Linux 4.9
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* Clang 3.8 or GCC 6.3
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However, using more recent releases is highly recommended. Older versions of
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the dependencies may be compatible at the moment but are not tested and will
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explicitly not be supported.
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Major releases of Android will be supported until tags stop being pushed to
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the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Google supports each major release
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with security patches for 3 years, but tagged releases of the Android Open
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Source Project are more than just security patches and are no longer pushed
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once no officially supported devices are using them anymore. For example, at
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the time of writing (September 2018), AOSP only has tagged releases for 8.1
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(Nexus 5X, Nexus 5X, Pixel C) and 9.0 (Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL).
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There are ongoing security patches for 6.0, 6.0.1, 7.0, 7.1.1, 7.1.2, 8.0, 8.1
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and 9.0 but only the active AOSP branches (8.1 and 9.0) are supported by this
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project and it doesn't make much sense to use much older releases with far
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less privacy and security hardening.
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# Basic design
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The current design is very simple and will become a bit more sophisticated as
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the basic features are completed and the implementation is hardened and
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optimized. The allocator is exclusive to 64-bit platforms in order to take full
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advantage of the abundant address space without being constrained by needing to
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keep the design compatible with 32-bit.
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Small allocations are always located in a large memory region reserved for slab
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allocations. It can be determined that an allocation is one of the small size
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classes from the address range. Each small size class has a separate reserved
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region within the larger region, and the size of a small allocation can simply
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be determined from the range. Each small size class has a separate out-of-line
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metadata array outside of the overall allocation region, with the index of the
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metadata struct within the array mapping to the index of the slab within the
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dedicated size class region. Slabs are a multiple of the page size and are
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paged aligned. The entire small size class region starts out memory protected
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and becomes readable / writable as it gets allocated, with idle slabs beyond
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the cache limit having their pages dropped and the memory protected again.
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Large allocations are tracked via a global hash table mapping their address to
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their size and guard size. They're simply memory mappings and get mapped on
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allocation and then unmapped on free.
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# Security properties
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* Fully out-of-line metadata
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* Deterministic detection of any invalid free (unallocated, unaligned, etc.)
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* Isolated memory region for slab allocations
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* Divided up into isolated inner regions for each size class
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* High entropy random base for each size class region
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* No deterministic / low entropy offsets between allocations with
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different size classes
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* Metadata is completely outside the slab allocation region
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* No references to metadata within the slab allocation region
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* No deterministic / low entropy offsets to metadata
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* Entire slab region starts out non-readable and non-writable
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* Slabs beyond the cache limit are purged and become non-readable and
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non-writable memory again
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* Fine-grained randomization within memory regions
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* Randomly sized guard regions for large allocations
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* Random slot selection within slabs
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* [in-progress] Randomized delayed free for slab allocations
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* [in-progress] Randomized allocation of slabs
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* [more randomization coming as the implementation is matured]
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* Slab allocations are zeroed on free and large allocations are unmapped
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* [in-progress] Detection of write-after-free by verifying zero filling is
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intact
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* Memory in fresh allocations is consistently zeroed due to it either being
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fresh pages or zeroed on free after previous usage
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* [in-progress] Delayed free via a combination of FIFO and randomization for
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slab allocations
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* Random canaries placed after each slab allocation to *absorb*
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and then later detect overflows/underflows
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* High entropy per-slab random values
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* [in-progress] Mangled into a unique value per slab slot (although not
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with a strong keyed hash due to performance limitations)
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* Possible slab locations are skipped and remain memory protected, leaving slab
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size class regions interspersed with guard pages
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* Zero size allocations are memory protected
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* Protected allocator metadata
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* Address space for metadata is never used for allocations and vice versa
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* [implementing stronger protection is in-progress]
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* Extension for retrieving the size of allocations with fallback
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to a sentinel for pointers not managed by the allocator
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* Can also return accurate values for pointers *within* small allocations
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* The same applies to pointers within the first page of large allocations,
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otherwise it currently has to return a sentinel
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* No alignment tricks interfering with ASLR like jemalloc, PartitionAlloc, etc.
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* No usage of the legacy brk heap
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* Aggressive sanity checks
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* Errors other than ENOMEM from mmap, munmap, mprotect and mremap treated
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as fatal, which can help to decent memory management gone wrong elsewhere
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in the program
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# Randomness
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The current implementation of random number generation for randomization-based
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mitigations is based on generating a keystream from a stream cipher (ChaCha8)
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in small chunks. A separate CSPRNG is used for each small size class, large
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allocations, etc. in order to fit into the existing fine-grained locking model
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without needing to waste memory per thread by having the CSPRNG state in Thread
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Local Storage. Similarly, it's protected via the same approach taken for the
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rest of the metadata. The stream cipher is regularly reseeded from the OS to
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provide backtracking and prediction resistance with a negligible cost. The
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reseed interval simply needs to be adjusted to the point that it stops
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registering as having any significant performance impact. The performance
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impact on recent Linux kernels is primarily from the high cost of system calls
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and locking since the implementation is quite efficient (ChaCha20), especially
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for just generating the key and nonce for another stream cipher (ChaCha8).
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ChaCha8 is a great fit because it's extremely fast across platforms without
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relying on hardware support or complex platform-specific code. The security
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margins of ChaCha20 would be completely overkill for the use case. Using
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ChaCha8 avoids needing to resort to a non-cryptographically secure PRNG or
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something without a lot of scrunity. The current implementation is simply the
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reference implementation of ChaCha8 converted into a pure keystream by ripping
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out the XOR of the message into the keystream.
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The random range generation functions are a highly optimized implementation
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too. Traditional uniform random number generation within a range is very high
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overhead and can easily dwarf the cost of an efficient CSPRNG.
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# Size classes
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The zero byte size class is a special case of the smallest regular size class. It's allocated in a
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separate region with the memory left non-readable and non-writable.
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The slab slot count for each size class is not yet finely tuned beyond choosing values avoiding
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internal fragmentation for slabs (i.e. avoiding wasted space due to page size rounding).
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The choice of size classes is the same as jemalloc, but with a much different approach to the
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slabs containing them:
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> size classes are multiples of the quantum [16], spaced such that there are four size classes for
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> each doubling in size, which limits internal fragmentation to approximately 20% for all but the
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> smallest size classes
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| size class | worst case internal fragmentation | slab slots | slab size | worst case internal fragmentation for slabs |
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| - | - | - | - | - |
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| 16 | 100% | 256 | 4096 | 0.0% |
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| 32 | 46.875% | 128 | 4096 | 0.0% |
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| 48 | 31.25% | 85 | 4096 | 0.390625% |
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| 64 | 23.4375% | 64 | 4096 | 0.0% |
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| 80 | 18.75% | 51 | 4096 | 0.390625% |
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| 96 | 15.625% | 42 | 4096 | 1.5625% |
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| 112 | 13.392857142857139% | 36 | 4096 | 1.5625% |
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| 128 | 11.71875% | 64 | 8192 | 0.0% |
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| 160 | 19.375% | 51 | 8192 | 0.390625% |
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| 192 | 16.145833333333343% | 64 | 12288 | 0.0% |
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| 224 | 13.839285714285708% | 54 | 12288 | 1.5625% |
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| 256 | 12.109375% | 64 | 16384 | 0.0% |
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| 320 | 19.6875% | 64 | 20480 | 0.0% |
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| 384 | 16.40625% | 64 | 24576 | 0.0% |
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| 448 | 14.0625% | 64 | 28672 | 0.0% |
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| 512 | 12.3046875% | 64 | 32768 | 0.0% |
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| 640 | 19.84375% | 64 | 40960 | 0.0% |
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| 768 | 16.536458333333343% | 64 | 49152 | 0.0% |
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| 896 | 14.174107142857139% | 64 | 57344 | 0.0% |
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| 1024 | 12.40234375% | 64 | 65536 | 0.0% |
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| 1280 | 19.921875% | 16 | 20480 | 0.0% |
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| 1536 | 16.6015625% | 16 | 24576 | 0.0% |
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| 1792 | 14.229910714285708% | 16 | 28672 | 0.0% |
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| 2048 | 12.451171875% | 16 | 32768 | 0.0% |
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| 2560 | 19.9609375% | 8 | 20480 | 0.0% |
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| 3072 | 16.634114583333343% | 8 | 24576 | 0.0% |
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| 3584 | 14.2578125% | 8 | 28672 | 0.0% |
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| 4096 | 12.4755859375% | 8 | 32768 | 0.0% |
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| 5120 | 19.98046875% | 8 | 40960 | 0.0% |
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| 6144 | 16.650390625% | 8 | 49152 | 0.0% |
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| 7168 | 14.271763392857139% | 8 | 57344 | 0.0% |
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| 8192 | 12.48779296875% | 8 | 65536 | 0.0% |
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| 10240 | 19.990234375% | 6 | 61440 | 0.0% |
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| 12288 | 16.658528645833343% | 5 | 61440 | 0.0% |
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| 14336 | 14.278738839285708% | 4 | 57344 | 0.0% |
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| 16384 | 12.493896484375% | 4 | 65536 | 0.0% |
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