Posts Tagged ‘automation’

Communicating with a Firefox extension from Selenium

Monday, May 20th, 2013

Edit: I think this now longer works with more recent versions of Firefox, or at least I have given up on this strategy and gone for extending Webdriver to do what I want instead.

For something I am currently working on I wanted to use Selenium to automatically access some parts of Firefox which are not accessible from a page. The chosen method was to use a Firefox extension and send events between the page and the extension to carry data. Getting this working was more tedious than I was expecting, perhaps mainly because I have tried to avoid javascript whenever possible in the past.

The following code extracts set up listeners with Selenium and the Firefox extension and send one event in each direction. Using this to do proper communication and to run automated tests is left as an exercise for the author but hopefully someone else will find this useful as a starting point. The full code base this forms part of will be open sourced and made public at some future point when it does something more useful.

App.java


package uk.ac.cam.cl.dtg.sync;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxProfile;

public class App {
private static final String SEND = "\"syncCommandToExtension\"";
private static final String RECV = "\"syncCommandToPage\"";

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
// This is where maven is configured to put the compiled .xpi
File extensionFile = new File("target/extension.xpi");
// So that the relevant Firefox extension developer settings get turned on.
File developerFile = new File("developer_profile-0.1-fn+fx.xpi");
FirefoxProfile firefoxProfile = new FirefoxProfile();
firefoxProfile.addExtension(extensionFile);
firefoxProfile.addExtension(developerFile);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(firefoxProfile);
driver.get("about:blank");
if (driver instanceof JavascriptExecutor) {
AsyncExecute executor = new AsyncExecute(((JavascriptExecutor) driver));
executor.execute("document.addEventListener( " + RECV + ", function(aEvent) { document.title = (" + RECV
+ " + aEvent) }, true);");
executor.execute(
"document.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent(" + SEND + "));");

} else {
System.err.println("Driver does not support javascript execution");
}
}

/**
* Encapsulate the boilerplate code required to execute javascript with Selenium
*/
private static class AsyncExecute {
private final JavascriptExecutor executor;

public AsyncExecute(JavascriptExecutor executor) {
this.executor = executor;
}

public void execute(String javascript) {
executor.executeAsyncScript("var callback = arguments[arguments.length - 1];"+ javascript
+ "callback(null);", new Object[0]);
}
}
}

browserOverlay.js Originally cribbed from the XUL School hello world tutorial.


document.addEventListener(
"syncCommandToExtension", function(aEvent) { window.alert("document syncCommandToExtension" + aEvent);/* do stuff*/ }, true, true);

// do not try to add a callback until the browser window has
// been initialised. We add a callback to the tabbed browser
// when the browser's window gets loaded.
window.addEventListener("load", function () {
// Add a callback to be run every time a document loads.
// note that this includes frames/iframes within the document
gBrowser.addEventListener("load", pageLoadSetup, true);
}, false);

function syncLog(message){
Application.console.log("SYNC-TEST: " + message);
}

function sendToPage(doc) {
doc.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent("syncCommandToPage"));
}

function pageLoadSetup(event) {
// this is the content document of the loaded page.
let doc = event.originalTarget;

if (doc instanceof HTMLDocument) {
// is this an inner frame?
if (doc.defaultView.frameElement) {
// Frame within a tab was loaded.
// Find the root document:
while (doc.defaultView.frameElement) {
doc = doc.defaultView.frameElement.ownerDocument;
}
}
// The event listener is added after the page has loaded and we don't want to trigger
// the event until the listener is registered.
setTimeout(function () {sendToPage(doc);},1000);
};
};

Raspberry Pi Entropy server

Thursday, August 23rd, 2012

The Raspberry Pi project is one of the more popular projects the Computer Lab is involved with at the moment and all the incoming freshers are getting one.

One of the things I have been working on as a Research Assistant in the Digital Technology Group is on improving the infrastructure we use for research and my current efforts include using puppet to automate the configuration of our servers.

We have a number of servers which are VMs and hence can be a little short of entropy. One solution to having a shortage of entropy is an ‘entropy key‘ which is a little USB device which uses reverse biased diodes to generate randomness and has a little ARM chip (ARM is something the CL is rather proud of) which does a pile of crypto and analysis to ensure that it is good randomness. As has been done before (with pretty graphs) this can then be fed to VMs providing them with the randomness they want.

My solution to the need for some physical hardware to host the entropy key was a Raspberry Pi because I don’t need very much compute power and dedicated hardware means that it is less likely to get randomly reinstalled. A rPi can be thought of as the hardware equivalent of a small VM.

Unboxed Raspberry Pi with entropy key

I got the rPi from Rob Mullins by taking a short walk down the corridor on the condition that there be photos. One of the interesting things about using rPis for servers is that the cost of the hardware is negligible in comparison with the cost of connecting that hardware to the network and configuring it.

The Raspberry Pi with entropy key temporarily installed in a wiring closet

The rPi is now happily serving entropy to various VMs from the back of a shelf in one of the racks in a server room (not the one shown, we had to move it elsewhere).

Initially it was serving entropy in the clear via the EGD protocol over TCP. Clearly this is rather bad as observable entropy doesn’t really gain you anything (and might lose you everything). Hence it was necessary to use crypto to protect the transport from the rPi to the VMs.
This is managed by the dtg::entropy, dtg::entropy::host and dtg::entropy::client classes which generate the relevant config for egd-linux and stunnel.

This generates an egd-client.conf which looks like this:

; This stunnel config is managed by Puppet.

sslVersion = TLSv1
client = yes

setuid = egd-client
setgid = egd-client
pid = /egd-client.pid
chroot = /var/lib/stunnel4/egd-client

socket = l:TCP_NODELAY=1
socket = r:TCP_NODELAY=1
TIMEOUTclose = 0

debug = 0
output = /egd-client.log

verify = 3

CAfile = /usr/local/share/ssl/cafile

[egd-client]
accept = 7777
connect = entropy.dtg.cl.cam.ac.uk:7776

And a host config like:

; This stunnel config is managed by Puppet.

sslVersion = TLSv1

setuid = egd-host
setgid = egd-host
pid = /egd-host.pid
chroot = /var/lib/stunnel4/egd-host

socket = l:TCP_NODELAY=1
socket = r:TCP_NODELAY=1
TIMEOUTclose = 0

debug = 0
output = /egd-host.log

cert = /root/puppet/ssl/stunnel.pem
key = /root/puppet/ssl/stunnel.pem
CAfile = /usr/local/share/ssl/cafile

[egd-host]
accept = 7776
connect = 777
cert = /root/puppet/ssl/stunnel.pem
key = /root/puppet/ssl/stunnel.pem
CAfile = /usr/local/share/ssl/cafile

Getting that right was somewhat tedious due to defaults not working well together.
openssl s_client -connect entropy.dtg.cl.cam.ac.uk:7776
and a python egd client were useful for debugging. In the version of debian in rasperian the stunnel binary points to an stunnel3 compatibility script around the actual stunnel4 binary which resulted in much confusion when trying to run stunnel manually.