Bug 916279

Summary: kvm/spice password provided on command line should be masked from process ps status
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Frank Ch. Eigler <fche>
Component: qemuAssignee: Fedora Virtualization Maintainers <virt-maint>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: rawhideCC: amit.shah, berrange, cfergeau, crobinso, dwmw2, itamar, pbonzini, rjones, scottt.tw, virt-maint
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Last Closed: 2013-02-28 22:18:14 UTC Type: Bug
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Frank Ch. Eigler 2013-02-27 17:37:23 UTC 
Plaintext-specified passwords should be nuked from the later process-visible command line, making this a bit of a security risk.

% qemu-kvm -vga qxl -spice port:NNN,password=FOOBAR &
% ps awux
[...shows FOOBAR...]

It may be possible to correct this by updating argv[] string contents at run time.
Comment 1 Daniel Berrangé 2013-02-27 22:43:34 UTC 
While this feature exists, it is strongly recommended that no one use it. There is a secure way to provide a password via the monitor command, which all management apps including libvirt use in preference to this. I don't think it is worth going to the trouble of trying to munge argv. People should simply not use this feature at all.
Comment 2 Cole Robinson 2013-02-28 22:18:14 UTC 
(In reply to comment #1)
> While this feature exists, it is strongly recommended that no one use it.
> There is a secure way to provide a password via the monitor command, which
> all management apps including libvirt use in preference to this. I don't
> think it is worth going to the trouble of trying to munge argv. People
> should simply not use this feature at all.

Agreed. Frank, if you still feel strongly about it, please file an upstream qemu bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/