How to handle VirtualBox 5 encrypted machine passwords?

[michaelsanford]

Problem Context

VirtualBox 5.0 now supports encrypted virtual disk images, which non-trivially complicates launch of headless VMs (see #24).

There does not appear to be a method for bypassing our module and passing passwords as, say, environment variables directly to VirtualBox. This means that node-virtualbox will have to handle them in order to control an encrypted VM.

The problem of what to do about the virtual machine passwords is non-trivial. Ideally, I'd like not to handle them at all. I'm devoted to maintaining the trust of the community; being open source, we can demonstrate our eventual implementation.

Possible Solutions

1. Read environment variable from process.env.VARNAME that the user has passed to their application and simply pass it along in memory to controlvm. It could follow some naming convention that allows us to determine which VM it belongs to without worrying about storing a mapping.

[michaelsanford]

Closing for seeming lack of community need.

We could reopen this if it becomes necessary.