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

To: Masami Watanabe <masami.watanabe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] Individual passwords for guest VNC servers ?
From: "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 02:38:40 +0100
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On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 10:23:56AM +0900, Masami Watanabe wrote:
> I'm thinking of adding the following protection to VNC console.
> I know it's not perfect, nonetheless, it's far better than the current
> no protection situation. Please comment.
> 
> Specification:
> - The same challenge-response auth scheme as standard VNC to be available
>   from VNC viewer (like RealVNC).

Yeah, looking at the various clients, challenge-response is the only one
we can really rely on being present - in fact its the only one supported
by Fedora VNC client (RealVNC IIRC?) at all. 

> - The vnc password of each VM is described in the VM configuration file.
>   When omit the password, do not use authentification.
>     ex) vnc_passwd = xxxxx

I think we should be secure by default - if they omit the password then
we should either generate one - and store it in xenstore, or refuse to
activate VNC server. If we really really want to allow no passwords, then
admin could have to explicitly request it with vnc_no_password=1
in the config file - but my prefernce is still that we should flat out 
refuse to allow an empty password - in this day & day its just plain wrong.
RealVNC server for example, refuses to allow empty password.

> - Where "xxxxx" is an uuencoded encrypted password, that is,
>   you can get this value by
>   # cat ~/.vnc/passwd | uuencode -m passwd
>     (needs uuencode command: sharutils package)

Perhaps base64 would be preferable - that's a standard part of Linux
coreutils toolset, rather than an addon like uuencode is.

Regards,
Dan.
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