Add VNC support (Milestone 6, issue #3)

Browse Source

Implements RFB (RFC 6143) directly against QTcpSocket. No permissively
licensed VNC client library exists to vendor the way FreeRDP was for RDP:
LibVNCClient is GPLv2, gtk-vnc is LGPL but GTK-tied, and vendoring either
would force a licensing decision on the whole (MIT) project. This is
from-scratch protocol code instead, threaded like SshSessionBackend (a
QObject on its own QThread driven by Qt's own async socket signals)
rather than RdpSessionBackend's manual worker-thread/blocking-loop
pattern, since QTcpSocket is already async.

Scope, matching SessionTab's existing SSH/RDP dispatch pattern
(session_backend_factory.cpp, session_tab.cpp's widget construction and
signal wiring) and VncDisplayWidget mirroring RdpDisplayWidget's
scale-to-fit rendering:
- Protocol handshake: RFB 3.3/3.7/3.8 negotiated explicitly (the
  SecurityResult message only exists in 3.8; pre-3.8 servers signal auth
  failure by closing the socket, which the disconnect handler accounts
  for)
- VNC Authentication (DES challenge-response, via OpenSSL's classic DES
  API) and no-auth security types
- Raw + CopyRect framebuffer decoding into a persistent QImage, requesting
  a fixed 32bpp format whose byte layout matches QImage::Format_RGB32
  directly (same zero-conversion trick RdpSessionBackend uses for
  FreeRDP's GDI buffer)
- Keyboard (Qt key -> X11 keysym, including the Unicode-beyond-Latin-1
  keysym convention) and mouse/wheel input forwarding

Explicit non-goals for this pass (see docs/PROGRESS.md for the full
list): Apple's Screen Sharing auth (so this can't yet reach macOS's
built-in VNC server), compression encodings beyond Raw/CopyRect, dynamic
resize, remote cursor shape sync, clipboard sync.

19 unit tests (tests/test_vnc_session_backend.cpp): pure-function
coverage (DES key prep verified against an independently documented test
vector for password "COW", X11 keysym mapping, socket-error mapping) plus
state-machine coverage against a scripted in-process fake RFB server
covering all three protocol-version handshake shapes, auth success/
failure, unsupported security types, and pixel-accurate Raw decoding.
That harness caught a real re-entrancy bug: QAbstractSocket::abort()
synchronously re-emits disconnected() before returning, so
failConnection() calling it was silently letting a second, generic
disconnected-socket handler overwrite an already-correct, specific error
message.

Also verified live against a real, independently implemented VNC server
(TightVNC on Windows): connect with VNC Authentication, correct
framebuffer dimensions and pixel data, clean disconnect, reconnect.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

...

This commit is contained in:

ksmith

2026-09-15 18:02:49 -06:00

co-authored by Claude Sonnet 5

parent dbcc20d155

commit 6da9dc6ca5

12 changed files with 2097 additions and 21 deletions

Show all changes Ignore whitespace when comparing lines Ignore changes in amount of whitespace Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL

Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

src/vnc_session_backend.cpp

+1027

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load Diff