Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Make password based authentication the default for VNC

[Attila-Mihaly Balazs]

On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 12:24 PM, Daniel P. Berrange <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 07, 2016 at 12:13:06PM +0300, Attila-Mihaly Balazs wrote:
>> To improve the security of the embedded VNC server make password
>> based authentication the default when no authentication mechanism
>> is specified.
>
> VNC password authentication offers no meaningful level of security,
> so this is really just going to change long standing default behaviour
> of QEMU VNC configuration without any real world benefit IMHO.
>

While VNC password auth is quite limited (literally - to 8 characters
:-)) it's still much better than just having an open VNC server. For
example considering uppercase + lowercase + numbers (not even symbols)
we would get a ~48 bit key which should hold up causal bruteforcers.

> Anyone who actually wants credible real world security should be using
> the TLS and/or SASL options to VNC, never the awful legacy passwd based
> auth.
>

Agreed. The target of this patch is however not people who know that
they want security, but rather people who don't know it :-). Ie.
people who just run things with their default settings and stop as
soon as it seems to work, without conideration for security.

Regards,
Attila

> Regards,
> Daniel
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