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Basic info

  • Time: Wednesday 17 January 2024 at 13:00 CEST (11:00 UTC)
  • Place: #openvpn-meeting channel on LiberaChat IRC network

Topics

Current topics

New: small security issue reported in OpenVPN GUI

  • lev is looking into this.
  • dazo will work with lev to arrange a CVE report.

Mattock needs things to do

  • TracWikiReplacements
    • There are a couple of potential Wiki alternatives in that list
    • More research or deploy something to get some experience on the options?
  • ServerSideTestingImprovementPlan
    • Do we want to start doing some improvements on this front? If so, which would be a priority?
  • Buildbot
    • Mattock set up Buildbot master successfully on Ubuntu 20.04 (current production instance?) as well as Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 23.10
    • Any buildbot-related improvement we could do?
    • Maybe building snapshot packages (deb/rpm) in buildbot and publishing them automatically?
      • The pragmatic way would be to use FPM instead of "official" packaging tools
      • Cloudfront + S3 + aptly might be a good solution for public repos with minimal/non-existent management overhead

Closed: No meeting on 27th December or 3 January.

  • Normal meetings to resume on January 10 2024.

OpenVPN 2.6.9 release

  • Given that we're so close to the end of the year, we'll push this to next year.
  • The --tls-export-cert PR needs a little love first.
  • Tentative new release date is January 10.

Forums topics

  • There has been a lot of spam. An antispam module had expired. We fixed that. But there's still the occasional bit of spam.
  • We agreed in the last meeting to commit to a path to get a new VM and switch to vBulletin and disconnect from community LDAP logins.
  • The new VM is delivered, the license should be delivered this week too, so then ecrist can get to work.
  • Regarding CloudFlare, currently not enabled on forums, but we will enable it at some point on the new VM.

Status of Trac/Wiki

  • ordex wanted to discuss the state of Trac/Wiki. Do we move to something else? Do we update existing?
  • mattock has been volunteered to look into alternatives.
  • It must be open source. Self-hosted or hosted open-source both fine.
  • There is no hard requirement for LDAP capability.
  • Should have access controls so only approved members can edit.

Status of community LDAP sign-in solution

  • We use it currently for forums, wiki, gerrit, patchwork. We are seriously considering getting rid of it.
  • The reality is that 99.99% of forums users do not interact with the other tools.
  • And that the small group of contributors to wiki and gerrit does not justify the need for an LDAP sign-in solution.
  • So we're inclined to disconnect from LDAP. For the forums, we already intend to do that now.
  • No final decision reached at this time. Considering our options.

Packet header order

  • plaisthos wanted to get consensus/decision on whether we do that as part of the rekeying improvements.
  • Generally in favor of adding a new negotiable packet format, so long as plaisthos and syzzer are in agreement.

Plan to improve server-side testing

TLS 1.0 PRF problem

  • Patches for this have been created and are in review, have not made it in yet.

Community funding

  • ordex has an initiative he wants to bring up regarding dev resources to be added to the community.
  • This may tie into the donations topic.
  • In short, ordex convinced OTF (Open Tech Fund) to provide a "test FOSS funding scheme" to OpenVPN.
  • This would for example allow paying for allocated hours for mattock and cron2 to work on OpenVPN community tasks.
  • This is to be worked out more and in collaboration between OpenVPN Community, OpenVPN Inc., and OTF.

Donations for OpenVPN community

  • There is currently no place to donate money to the community, and we do want to allow that.
  • We need to figure out how to deal with that legally, and what payment methods to accept and how.
  • Probably plastic-money is a must. Maybe PayPal as well. Bitcoin seems to encounter some resistance in the discussions.
  • We definitely do not want the donation thing to be forced - have a mechanism to do it, but keep it out of the way.
  • Random things yelled out (to investigate): legal entity? stripe? paypal? plastic-money? open collective? GitHub sponsors? Linux foundation? sf conservancy?
  • ordex suggested that he will take a look in January to figure out what legalities etc are involved in getting a legal entity for OpenVPN community.

Website release process woes

  • Website team continues to report that they are on the verge of launching the new stuff.
  • But there is a release freeze planned for the last weeks of December so we may not actually get it this year.

License amendment for OpenVPN2 to solve openssl/mbedtls licensing issues

  • For new contributions, the new license already applies.
  • The --tls-export-cert code was removed, and plaisthos will reimplement it.
  • Then it is up to dazo to review things so we can work on finalizing this.
  • One of the last tasks is reviewing if remaining items are trivial patches, and maybe get legal advice on those if necessary.

Tunnelcrack progress

OpenVPN community meetup 2024

  • Naming: We decided to rename from 'Hackathon' to 'OpenVPN community meetup'. This has a more open spirit to it, as we want to encourage developers and those interested in contributing to feel welcome.
  • Where: Karlsruhe, Germany. It is a relatively central location in Europe and is fairly easily reachable by train. A meeting location is yet to be arranged.
  • When: At the moment tentatively set to 20-22 September 2024.
  • Who: We'll do an open invitation to the openvpn-devel mailing list, but also CC: specifically past attendees and people of interest.
  • Shirts: There is plenty of time still to prepare a shirt design.

Static-key mini how-to is outdated.

  • This page is outdated badly: Static-key mini how-to
  • The company will send this to a tech writer to redo based on GitHub documentation info and also retain a link to that GitHub doc.
  • Having a simple guide online will help adoption.

OpenVPN 2.6 performance results.

  • Tests should cover: gre, ipsec, userland, dco
  • Platforms: linux, freebsd, windows
  • Requires time to be dedicated to doing this
  • When time available will do it

What's going on with new taskbar icons?

  • matt provided icons in GitHub Issue #595
  • Last update: will be picked up by selva when he has time

security@openvpn.net mailing list

  • The company is trying to get to SOC2 compliance.
  • Probably will need a simple NDA to be signed by recipients of emails to security@openvpn.net
  • The company guy took the standard NDA we use for contractors, suggests using that.
  • novaflash thinks we should review that first to see if it's really suitable or not, community members are not contractors after all.

Another key signing topic

  • The company switched EV code signing to CloudHSM, this is the same cert type we use for driver signing, is also suitable for binary signing.
  • In the future, we could possibly switch the community to that same key. Saves having to maintain 2 different keys.
  • Depends on how hard/easy it is to access the company key signing thingee from community infrastructure.
  • Also no high priority at the moment, we have a working solution now.

SBOM topic

  • cron2 was asked if OpenVPN has a software bill of materials. The answer was no.
  • Coincidentally, in OpenVPN Inc a security requirement is to have an SBOM so this is on our list of things to do
  • When we pick up this task, we can coordinate on it.

Management interface documentation on main website will be updated with info from doc/management-notes.txt

  • novaflash will pick this up at some point.