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IrcMeetings

Basic info

  • Time: Wednesday 26 June 2024 at 14:00 CEST (12:00 UTC)
  • Place: #openvpn-meeting channel on LiberaChat IRC network

Topics

Current topics

New: release openvpn 2.6.12

The security issue addressed in 2.6.11 has the known issue that it breaks certain setups with backend scripts that produce custom auth_failed messages. This will be addressed in the upcoming 2.6.12 release. An improvement in the area of the LZO library is also in the works.

Updated: release openvpn 2.6.11

This release was done last week on June 20th. We have a fix for a reported issue with localized versions of Windows and a custom installation path of OpenVPN GUI. Looks like we can update to I002 for the Windows installer. This will likely go out today. The tunnelcrack mitigations for Windows are held back because we have had absolutely no response on the mailing lists for testing these and confirming that it doesn't break things. If someone can contribute to testing this we can follow up with a 2.6.12 release in a few weeks that contains the tunnelcrack mitigations for Windows. Otherwise, it goes to 2.7.

Updated: DCO and Linux upstreaming, API change

Upstreaming DCO to Linux is proceeding, it is in the review stage at the moment. ordex has sent in patchset version 4. There will be an API change that makes it incompatible with the current implementation. A graceful solution to that was already discussed and in motion. giaan will be working on this.

Updated: Tunnelcrack progress

Status update on TunnelCrack mitigations:
The tunnelcrack mitigation for Windows has gone in master, which will go to the 2.7 release. There is the possibility for it to go to 2.6.x if we can find testers for this. Windows, openvpn2: merged to master, not to 2.6.x. openvpn3: in code review. Linux, openvpn2: in progress. openvpn3: in progress. macOS: to be determined. iOS: to be determined. Android: not vulnerable.

Updated: OpenVPN community meetup 2024

Wiki coordination page: Community Meetup 2024 Where: Karlsruhe, Germany. Meeting room found, need to find out how many participants roughly. When: Set to 20-22 September 2024. Shirts: novaflash spoke to matt - he will get us some design in august. We need to know how many participants will show. To that end, it makes sense if we put together an invite mail and send it out. novaflash put together a suggested mail; invite draft This will be sent out as an official invite to openvpn-devel and to some special guests.

buildbot PRs need attention

Getting these merged soonish would help avoid nasty merge conflicts down the line
Allow skipping build types
Add smoketest builds for openvpn3, openvpn3-linux and ovpn-dco
PR #48
Developers have been pinged in the meeting about these, so they'll take a look when they can.

fixing openvpn3-linux builds in Buildbot

Mattock has this almost working. Some platforms will have to be skipped because openvpn3-linux / gdbuspp dependencies (Meson in particular) are too old or missing. As an aside, OpenVPN3 Linux v22 dev for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Fedora 39 and 40 are in the release process. Next step is a 'regular' OpenVPN3 Linux v23 release again.

Linux arm64 buildbot workers

Mattock has done initial research. Docker seems to support (QEMU) emulated non-native containers, but Buildbot might be missing the glue to make it work. Patching Buildbot should not be that difficult. External (arm64) Docker host might be a more performant alternative option.

how to proceed with lzo2.pc

pc file suggests "all includes should be done without lzo/ prefix" - which is generally not a bad idea, but needs code changes beyond configure (right?) There are some options to make changes here. For now, we'll just keep working around this issue. One thing seems clear; it would be too early to rip it out, it would most likely affect too many people still using it despite the fact that they shouldn't. An option we have is to use the OpenVPN3 implementation of lzo and port that to OpenVPN2, to solve this. This is a topic that will be moved to the OpenVPN community meetup 2024.

run tests of 2.x against openvpn3? how?

There is a 'null client' variant of ovpncli that allows to make VPN connections but not fully, for testing purposes. This is in the openvpn3 repository.

community.openvpn.net trac wiki

Wiki.js felt quite awkward and counterintuitive in practical tests done by mattock. It seems to focus on bling rather than usability. Xwiki felt quite bulky and enterprisey (a.k.a. full of "stuff") in the practical tests by mattock. It seems an overkill for our simple use-case. Mediawiki no longer feels as nasty as it once did :) Maybe some Git-based wiki-type solution would be ok?

forums topics

rob0 and novaflash will work to get access and then find some time to look at solving the cloudflare related issue. Unfortunately the past weeks were difficult to find time - holidays and travel and such. Will find time and push this forward. Plan is to soon switch URLs so new forum is on forums.openvpn.net and old forums is on archive address. - email confirmation on registration was suggested. - mod permissions, guide, hard or soft delete (chuck board?), what to do with GDPR, etc. (write it down and actually make it available to mods, maybe a hidden topic) - access for mods to logs so one can see what others did

donation collection

From earlier exploration it is clear that setting up a legal entity is not worth the expense at this point. We're just starting out with donations. What we can do is start out with an existing company that can collect the money and puts it to good community use. ordex volunteers to take this on. There are some options to consider. There may be existing solutions that we want to consider. PayPal seems overly expensive with all their fees. Stripe could be worth considering for credit card processing. GitHub Sponsors was mentioned as a possible solution, this is worth investigating. Open Collective was also mentioned, that needs some investigating how that exactly would work for us.

website release process

Waiting for faster way to update community downloads and security advisories on main site. Again postponed due to issues. Now planned for this week. We'll see.

Status of SBOM

There was a discussion between MaxF and djpig and others. For OpenVPN2 / OpenVPN-NL, there is not much overlap, as OpenVPN2 doesn't ship much in terms of libraries, but OpenVPN-NL does. The interesting use-case for an SBOM is really the OpenVPN Windows GUI client.

Security mailing list

Static-key mini how-to is outdated.

This page is outdated badly: Static Key Mini How-To company will send this to tech writer to redo based on example fingerprint 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 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 Issue #595 last update: will be picked up by selva when he has time

software code signing topic

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