Migrating a Business to Linux — 13
NetworkManager saves all connections, which includes saving all pre-shared keys. While this default behavior makes sense for single users who visit the same access points all the time, the design does not make sense in our business. Often we need to connect to customer routers to troubleshoot network issues. This does require the user to reveal their pre-shared key, but none refuse. Nonetheless, this information is stored on the computer’s hard disk.
While we encrypt our field laptop hard disks, encryption is good only when a computer is “at rest” — powered off. Although the system connections are stored with file permissions 600 the idea that the customer’s information was permanently stored was uncomfortable to us. Should a system be compromised while powered on that information would then be easily viewed and misused.
After a couple of months I viewed the stored connections on our two trial laptops. From that list I derived a short list of connections that we want to be permanently stored. All other connections would get scrubbed.
I wrote a short shell script that launches on boot and in an hourly cron job. Any connection that is not part of our approved permanent list and is not currently active gets deleted using the nmcli command. The latter criterion is important because we do not want a customer’s connection configuration being deleted while we were still actively at the customer’s location.
The preferred solution is simply provide an option in NetworkManager that allows users to treat all connections as session-only unless explicitly configured otherwise.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General, Migrate, Ubuntu
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