[lxc-devel] Strawman proposal... Default passwords in templates...

[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

Hello, just sharing my 2 cents here.

What about 2 separate options?

If the user that is running lxc-create have ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub use that for
root.

and

allow use an external id_rsa.pub as an argument in the command line?

In Vagrant, a tool used to create vm's in virtualbox/vmware, they have a
public private/pub key, so all the machines can be accessed using vagrant's
pub key, which for non-hardcore users is pretty convenient.

Now that lxc is going mainstream with vendor support, and tools like
docker, if lxc include a private/pub key with the installation, I think
will made the life easier to pack and share containers a la vagrant.

Alvaro.


On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 6:50 PM, Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn at ubuntu.com>wrote:

> Quoting Michael H. Warfield (mhw at WittsEnd.com):
> > > Why not purely random?  I also liked the suggestion of putting the
> > > password in a file under $lxcpath/$lxcname - though chmod 600 owned
> > > by the calling user, not root.  I prefer not outputting it in
> > > stdout during create, but am not *strongly* against it.
> >
> > I'm actually largely against "purely random" passwords, particularly
>
> Well by purely random I of course meant using a reasonable char set.
> But I'm lazy and prefer to type (if I have to) 8 random chars to a bunch
> of boilerplate including mylongcontainername...  And realistically, if
> I'm not using ssh keys, and we have the pwd in a file, i'll be having a
> script fetch the pwd from the file for me on login.
>
> > when we're just trying to defeat a particular attack vector like this,
> > especially when combined with expiring the password.  I'm not sure
> > there's really anything significant left on the attack tree we need to
> > worry about (especially with the current state of affairs) and purely
> > random passwords are a significant PITA.  I think xkcd had it nailed
> > here:
> >
> > https://xkcd.com/936/
>
> OTOH for most of the containers I create I'll log in at most once, so
> memorable passwords are not useful.  Also your proposal still had some
> random chars, so at least with my throwaway approach to containers 2 or
> 8 random chars makes no difference - I'll have to look it up.
>
> But it sounds like we may want to be able to pass a password template,
> i.e.  "lxc_${name}_XXX" (or if on private network then maybe "root")
> into the template.
>
> > I'm open to storing it in a file and, yeah, adding a chown 600 is fine.
> > Raises and issue though that a number of these templates will only run
> > as root and have not been adapted for running under a non-priv user.
> > That's another discussion that I think you and I and others need to
> > engage in.
>
> Sadly some will never work as non-priv user.  Including 'ubuntu'.  At
> least until we get an in-kernel workaround enabling user namespaces to
> create some devices, which debootstrap insists on doing.
>
> -serge
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