# 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](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](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 - mattock posted [ServerSideTestingImprovementPlan](https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/ServerSideTestingImprovementPlan#no1) - It's a plan to improve server-side testing. mattock would like to get eyes on this and feedback. ### 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 - [TunnelCrack community wiki article](wiki:TunnelCrack) - Current status: when mitigations start appearing, we will mention them in meeting notes. ### 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](https://openvpn.net/community-resources/static-key-mini-howto/) - The company will send this to a tech writer to redo based on [GitHub documentation](https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn/blob/master/doc/man-sections/example-fingerprint.rst) 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](https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn-gui/issues/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.