Re: [Qemu-devel] Possible security enhancement for QEMU

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On 5 January 2015 at 18:13, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> Configuring 0.0.0.0 and no auth is a valid setup *provided* the virtualization
> host itself is on a secured network. In fact this is the normal setup for an
> OpenStack deployment, since the virt host/VNC server is not intended to ever
> be directly exposed to the internet. Instead the user accesses the VNC server
> via an authenticated VNC proxy tunnelled over HTTPs. So printing out such an
> error message or refusing to launch would be wrong - QEMU doesn't know the
> context of how it is being used.

Well, the question is what the default should be, and whether you should
have to take explicit action to enable a possibly-insecure configuration.
At the moment you don't, and this seems to have resulted in a lot of
people presumably unintentionally leaving themselves wide open to
access from the internet.

So it comes down to "are we willing to one-time break currently working
configs for people with openstack type deployments who will now need to
put no-auth-is-ok in their command line switches, in order to protect
new users against shooting themselves in the foot without realising it?".
You could argue it either way...

>> Seems reasonable to me. Some questions:
>>  * do we need an option for "yes, I know what I'm doing and do not
>>    want any authentication" ?
>>  * how many of these VMs are configured for wide-open VNC by libvirt or
>>    similar management tool rather than by the user directly running QEMU?
>
> Libvirt will always set the listen address to 127.0.0.1 if not otherwise
> specified, and so not rely on QEMU's (insecure) default.  So if any VMs
> managed by libvirt are using a public IP address, this was requested
> explicitly by the admin or the mgmt app using libvrt.

That's good to hear.

-- PMM