From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Daniel P. Berrange" Subject: Re: Individual passwords for guest VNC servers ? Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 02:38:40 +0100 Message-ID: <20060831013840.GB22345@redhat.com> References: <20060816181153.GC25831@redhat.com> <20060825004436.GL809@redhat.com> Reply-To: "Daniel P. Berrange" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com To: Masami Watanabe Cc: xen-devel@lists.xensource.com List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org 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. -- |=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston. +1 978 392 2496 -=| |=- Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ -=| |=- Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/ -=| |=- GnuPG: 7D3B9505 F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 -=|