From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1M1gj5-0001AP-Vr for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 06 May 2009 08:59:56 -0400 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1M1gj1-00019H-C6 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 06 May 2009 08:59:55 -0400 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=35163 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1M1gj1-00019E-7X for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 06 May 2009 08:59:51 -0400 Received: from qw-out-1920.google.com ([74.125.92.145]:58782) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1M1gj0-0006Ib-P6 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 06 May 2009 08:59:50 -0400 Received: by qw-out-1920.google.com with SMTP id 4so54285qwk.4 for ; Wed, 06 May 2009 05:59:50 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <4A0189C2.7020603@codemonkey.ws> Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 07:59:46 -0500 From: Anthony Liguori MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Add HTTP protocol using curl v2 References: <1241571650-16212-1-git-send-email-alex@csgraf.de> <20090506082810.GB23167@redhat.com> In-Reply-To: <20090506082810.GB23167@redhat.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: "Daniel P. Berrange" Cc: alex@csgraf.de, nolan@sigbus.net, qemu-devel@nongnu.org Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 03:00:50AM +0200, alex@csgraf.de wrote: > >> From: Alexander Graf >> >> Currently Qemu can read from posix I/O and NBD. This patch adds a >> third protocol to the game: HTTP. >> >> In certain situations it can be useful to access HTTP data directly, >> for example if you want to try out an http provided OS image, but >> don't know if you want to download it yet. >> >> Using this patch you can now try it on on the fly. Just use it like: >> >> qemu -cdrom http://host/path/my.iso >> > > I rather think there should be an explicit flag to allow use of http:// > URLs in filenames at runtime, not just 'configure' time. There are many > apps out there using QEMU which will be assuming QEMU treats all disk > paths as local files, and thus not got explicit code to check whether > a URI is passed. I could well see that some will consider it a security > issue to allow QEMU to download off the net, but if they updated to > a new QEMU with this patch, downloading would be allowed by default. > QEMU already supports protocol URLs (like nbd://). If a management app has some reason to restrict what QEMU has access to, they should be using SELinux or already scrubbing device names. I don't understand why accessing a URL would be a security issue though. I expect that management apps should be running QEMU as a non-privileged user and that from a security perspective, that user is restricted as much as the guest would be restricted. Regards, Anthony Liguori