Hi, At the moment SASL VNC authentication in libvirt allows any of the userids to access any of the VNC consoles on a particular libvirt host. There is a section in the qemu_command code marked "TODO: Support ACLs later" and we would really like the ability to have per VM user authorization to the VNC console from within libvirt. Essentially the people who are accessing the VNC consoles are not administrators and have no access to the Host server - so these ACLs need to be completely based on a separate list of userids to any access mechanism for the libvirtd itself. Given that the VNC restrictions are enforced within qemu from the monitor system, I'm presuming the authorization list is going to have to be passed in via XML and be capable of being updated throughout the life of a VM session. Unless there's another way of doing it... What's the feeling about how this feature should be provided within libvirt?
One issue is probably around migration and the server
(qemu-referenced) x509 certificates. If the certificates are
embedded (rather than referenced) in the domain XML they will
automatically migrate when the VM migrates, which is desirable.
Otherwise migration becomes (again) problematic and layers above
libvirt would have to take care of their migration.
The VNC session will still be lost due to the change of host and
thus the IP address and the client user will need to learn about
the new VNC port as well.
Quoting from Qemu documentation webpage:
http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-doc.html#vnc_005fsecurity
<quote>
The QEMU VNC server also implements the VeNCrypt extension
allowing use of
TLS for encryption of the session, and x509 certificates for
authentication.
The use of x509 certificates is strongly recommended, because TLS
on its
own is susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. Basic x509
certificate
support provides a secure session, but no authentication. This
allows any
client to connect, and provides an encrypted session.
qemu [...OPTIONS...] -vnc :1,tls,x509=/etc/pki/qemu -monitor stdio
In the above example /etc/pki/qemu should contain
at least three files, ca-cert.pem, server-cert.pem
and server-key.pem. Unprivileged users will want to
use a private directory, for example $HOME/.pki/qemu.
NB the server-key.pem file should be protected with
file mode 0600 to only be readable by the user owning it.
</quote>
It looks like the above mentioned 3 files would need to be
embedded...
Stefan