Qt Remote Objects Security Considerations

Overview

The purpose of Qt Remote Objects is the ability to call methods on objects that are not in the same process or on the same host as if they are in the same process. However, the Qt Remote Objects module is not designed with security in mind and provides no authentication of other hosts. The protocol has no way of discovering if two hosts are using different versions of the shared objects, and attackers sending random data can cause misbehavior or crashing. Because all hosts have equal access to the same methods on the shared objects, a single host can flood the others with high rates of method calls and large amounts of data. It must therefore be used in a trusted environment protected from the internet.

If internet-facing access to Qt Remote Objects functionality is needed, isolate the Qt Remote Objects nodes behind a hardened application-level gateway that exposes only the specific operations required.