page_title: “Security - Vagrant Share”

sidebar_current: “share-security”

Security

Sharing your Vagrant environment understandably raises a number of security concerns.

The primary security mechanism for Vagrant Share is security through obscurity along with an encryption key for SSH. Additionally, there are several configuration options made available to help control access and manage security:

  • --disable-http will not create a publicly accessible HTTP URL. When this is set, the only way to access the share is with vagrant connect.

  • --ssh-once will allow only one person to SSH into your shared environment. After the first SSH access, the keypair is physically deleted and SSH access won’t be possible anymore.

In addition to these options, there are other features we’ve built to help:

  • Vagrant share uses end-to-end TLS connections. So even unencrypted TCP streams are encrypted through the various proxies and only unencrypted during the final local communication between the local proxy and the Vagrant environment.

  • Share names, such as happy-panda-1234, are randomly chosen from a pool of over 40,000,000 possible names. And we’re routinely adding more words to grow this pool. It is unlikely that anyone will guess your share name.

  • SSH keys are encrypted by default, using a password that is not transmitted to our servers or across the network at all.

  • SSH is not shared by default, it must explicitly be shared with the --ssh flag.

  • A web interface we’ve built shows share history and will show basic access logs in the future.

  • Share sessions expire after a short time (currently 1 hour), but can also be expired manually by ctrl-c from the sharing machine or via the web interface.

Most importantly, you must understand that by running vagrant share, you are making your Vagrant environment accessible by anyone who knows the share name. When share is not running, it is not accessible.

Later, we will be expanding the security of this feature by adding ACLs, so you’re able to explicitly allow access to your share based on who is connecting.

For maximum security, we will also allow you to run your own Vagrant Share server. This option isn’t available yet.