IrcMeetings

Basic info

• Time: Wednesday 07 August 2024 at 14:00 CEST (12:00 UTC)
• Place: #openvpn-meeting channel on LiberaChat IRC network

Topics

Current topics

• 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: matt gave us 2 t-shirt designs and we reviewed them in the meeting.
  • We love the cartoon version, so if we can only have one, we'll do that. But if possible, getting the minimalistic one too would be cool.

• Live route updates

  • lev has a proposal to go through, to see if the approach is acceptable to community members.
  • cron2 hasn't had time to read through it yet.
  • So far it seems we are good with optional/mandatory options concept, and by default all options are mandatory.
  • Optional are prefixed with a question mark (?). The idea here is that if a client does not support updating that parameter live it can ignore it.
  • Whereas without such a prefix, it is mandatory, so if a client cannot update it live, it will do a normal reconnect to ensure changes are implemented.

• 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 (TunnelCrack community wiki article)

  • 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 Howto
  • company will send this to tech writer to redo based on GitHub doc 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 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.