IrcMeetings

Basic info

• Time: Wednesday 24 July 2024 at 14:00 CEST (12:00 UTC)
• Place: #openvpn-meeting channel on LiberaChat IRC network

Topics

Current topics

• Updated: release openvpn 2.6.12
  This was released on July 18th.

• New: live route updates
  lev has a proposal to go through, to see if the approach is acceptable to community members.

• OpenVPN community meetup 2024
  Hotel recommendation added; Hotel Santo in Karlsruhe.
  Wiki coordination page: CommunityMeetup2024
  Where: Karlsruhe, Germany. SteamWork, Karlsruhe.
  When: Set to 20-22 September 2024.
  Shirts: novaflash spoke to matt - he will get us some design in August.

• community.openvpn.net trac wiki
  novaflash tried out a few things and updated: NewWiki
  the search continues.
  the security level on community.openvpn.net was lowered by one notch. Immediately attacks happened again.
  turns out trac has a reflection attack vulnerability and this was mitigated. Let's see how it runs now.
  We know we need to replace this but need to find a solution that fits our needs first.

• forums topics
  novaflash has access and is working on a PoC setup combining old and new on an ubuntu server.

• Tunnelcrack progress
  Status update on TunnelCrack mitigations:
  The tunnelcrack mitigation for Windows has gone in master, which will go to 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.

• DCO and Linux upstreaming, API change
  Upstreaming DCO to Linux is proceeding, it is in review stage at the moment.
  ordex has sent in patchset version 5.
  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.
  (in a nutshell, make OpenVPN understand old and new API, DKMS and kernel versions both will then use new API, then we drop old API)

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 GitHub example 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 GitHub 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 the 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.