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

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 19/10/2015 17:46, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> > The difference is that guest-file-read/write have the payload in JSON;
>> > for file-based secrets the payload is not JSON.
> For non-file based secrets though, the payload *is* in the JSON,
> and per the cover letter, I actually anticipate passing all
> secrets inline in the JSON and only using the file backend for
> loading the initial master key. This avoids the need to do
> file handle passing and/or create lots of temporary files, when
> hotplugging resources.
> 
> > So I think that "binary" (which is the default anyway) would fit all the
> > usecases (direct over JSON, file-based, direct over command line).
> > Direct over JSON would be limited to valid UTF-8, but that's just a
> > limitation of the transport.
> 
> I don't think that's actually an acceptable limitation - I want the
> inline data passing to be fully usable for non-UTF-8 data too.

Of course, there's base64 for that.  On the other hand, I think there's
no reason for unencoded file-based data passing to be usable for UTF-8
data only.

Paolo