Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 01/17] crypto: add QCryptoSecret object class for password/key handling

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 05:18:56PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> 
> 
> On 19/10/2015 17:09, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > +
> > +    switch (secret->format) {
> > +    case QCRYPTO_SECRET_FORMAT_UTF8:
> > +        if (!g_utf8_validate(input, strlen(input), NULL)) {
> > +            error_setg(errp,
> > +                       "Data from secret %s is not valid UTF-8",
> > +                       secretid);
> > +            goto cleanup;
> > +        }
> > +        output = input;
> > +        input = NULL;
> > +        break;
> 
> Why validate secrets as UTF-8?  In other words why have "utf8" instead
> of "binary" as a possible QCryptoSecretFormat?

JSON doesn't accept arbitrary 8-bit binary data, so the alternative
'base64' is effectively providing binary data facility. Having to
use base64 for plain passwords is rather tedious though, so allowing
utf8 is a much more developer friendly approach for people using QEMU
without a mgmt tool like libvirt.

NB, this dual-format utf8-or-base64 approach matches the approach used
in QEMU guest agent for the guest-file-read/write commands for the same
reason.

Regards,
Daniel
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