Re: [PATCH 02/13] qcrypto-luks: implement encryption key management

[Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>]

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On 06.02.20 14:49, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 06, 2020 at 02:44:45PM +0100, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>> Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> writes:
>>
>>> Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Am 05.02.2020 um 11:03 hat Markus Armbruster geschrieben:
>>>>> Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com> writes:
>> [...]
>>>>>> Adding a key gets more complicated with your proposed interface because
>>>>>> state must be set explicitly now whereas before it was derived
>>>>>> automatically from the fact that if you give a key, only active makes
>>>>>> sense.
>>>>>
>>>>> The explicitness could be viewed as an improvement :)
>>>>
>>>> Not really. I mean, I really know to appreciate the advantages of
>>>> -blockdev where needed, but usually I don't want to type all that stuff
>>>> for the most common tasks. qemu-img amend is similar.
>>>>
>>>> For deleting, I might actually agree that explicitness is an
>>>> improvement, but for creating it's just unnecessary verbosity.
>>>>
>>>>> If you'd prefer implicit here: Max has patches for making union tags
>>>>> optional with a default.  They'd let you default active to true.
>>>>
>>>> I guess this would improve the usability in this case.
>>
>> Thinking and writing in the "Making QEMU easier for management tools and
>> applications" monster thread have made me realize we're mixing up two
>> aspects that ought to be kept separate: machine-friendly QMP and
>> human-friendly CLI.
>>
>> You argue that
>>
>>     $ qemu-img amend -o encrypt.keys.0.new-secret=sec0 test.qcow2
>>
>> is nicer than
>>
>>     $ qemu-img amend -o encrypt.keys.0.state=active,encrypt.keys.0.secret=sec0 test.qcow2
>>
>> and you do have a point: humans want their CLI terse.  Redundancy is
>> unwanted, except perhaps to protect users from dangerous accidents.  In
>> this example, state=active is redundant when a secret is given, because
>> anything else would be an error.
>>
>> In QMP, however, we like things simple and explicit, and we eschew
>> magic.
>>
>> This particular magic might just be simple enough to be acceptable in
>> QMP.  We'd "merely" have to support explicit defaults in the schema (a
>> clear improvement if you ask me), and optional union tags (tolerable as
>> long as the default comes from the schema, I guess).
>>
>> My point is: QAPI schema design *must* focus on QMP and nothing else.
>> If we try to serve both QMP and human-friendly CLI, we'll likely botch
>> both.
>>
>> I believe a truly human-friendly CLI requires more than just
>> human-friendly concrete syntax for QMP.  Same as HMP, really.
> 
> A human-friendly approach to this problem would never even
> have the generic "amend" design IMHO. Friendly would be to
> have a CLI that is approx the same as "cryptsetup" provides
> eg
> 
>     $ qemu-img add-key /path/to/disk
>     enter key>..
>     re-enter key>...
> 
> or
> 
>     qemu-img add-key --keyfile /some/file.txt /path/to/disk

I have only scanned through the discussion up until this point, but I
agree that amend doesn’t need to be human-friendly at all cost.

If we really want a human-friendly keyslot modification interface, we
can always add a specific qemu-img subcommand that provides high-level
succinct operations based on a low-level and more verbose amend interface.

(Or just a script that isn’t even built into qemu-img, because I suppose
such a operation “translation” would be easier to implement in a
scripting language.  Maybe qemu-img could be extended to invoke external
scripts for specific subcommands?  But anyway, those would all be ideas
for the future.)

Max


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