Re: [Xen-devel] Individual passwords for guest VNC servers ?

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 07:11:53PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> The current implementation of the VNC server in qemu-dm appears to just
> leverage whatever password the root user has set in /root/.vnc/passwd.
> This doesn't really have very nice semantics if one migrates the domain
> over to a different host...which may not have same VNC password file.

Ok, so looking more closly I'm wrong here. The VNC server in qemu-dm
does not use a password at all - it sets the VNC auth protocol to None.

At the same time it binds to 0.0.0.0 - so any HVM guest running VNC
is completely unsecured, accessible to anyone who can route to the
Dom0 host unless you've firewalled off all the ports >= 5900 on the
machine. This looks like a pretty serious flaw to be fixed for 3.0.3 

> Has anyone given any thought to / written any patches to enable assignment
> of different passwords to individual guest's VNC servers. At its simplest
> one could just allow the crypt/md5 hash of the desired password to be
> supplied in the xm config file, or XenD SEXPR when creating a new domain
> and pass that hash through to qemu-dm to use instead of /root/.vnc/passwd

It appears that given the way the standard VNC challenge-response auth
scheme works there's no choice but to store the actual password - at very 
least using some reversible encryption - we can't simply store the hash
as one would with passwords for /etc/shadow.  There are other newer
auth schemes defined in VNC protocol, but its not clear whether these
have broad support amongst VNC viewer clients.

Dan.
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