Default profile is not used if there is no "profile" key in the config

[Svieg]

@ProloG-Shaman was using malboxes and we found out that the default profile wasn't used because there was a check to see if the config had a "profile" key and if not, didn't apply any profile. The problem is, that renders the default profile useless. We then have to make a choice if we want to apply the profile-example.js for a default built. I personally think that we should.

[obilodeau]

I want to revert the change you merged in #88.

I explicitly disabled profile use by default. See my commit and explanation here: d564c93

Profiles is an experimental feature, the default config is easily fingerprintable and doesn't add value. This feature should be activated by end-users. Also, I disabled it because when you upgrade your malboxes the build would crash unless you modify your config (which malboxes doesn't do on upgrades). This is why I populate the profile with the default one now and I added the tests on template generation (see above commit).

If the default profile would do something like improve our fingerprinting resistance then I would see less of a problem enabling it by default. But right now it doesn't and it affected backwards compatibility.

What do you think?

[Svieg]

I think we should have a default profile (I agree we might want to do some prior testing before releasing it again) that would hide all the hypervisor artifacts (the use case where you want those is pretty rare). I think we mixed the concept of default profile and testing profile (that could be used to test for regressions). That being said, I agree we can revert this commit and change the default profile later to reflect those changes. Having a default profile highlights the way profiles work and highlights also the fact that they exist. Apart from that, can you explain the backwards compatibility issue?

[obilodeau]

have a default profile [...] that would hide all the hypervisor artifacts

Yes! That would be good. Although it wouldn't use the "package" keyword and would not demonstrate all the features but we can leave a commented example.

can you explain the backwards compatibility issue?

Before I made the fixes in d564c93, if you upgraded and had no profile statement in config (like everyone because the concept didn't exist) you would get a packer config that would make it crash.

The more I think about malboxes and talk about it, the more I feel we will eventually move towards a Vagrantfile or Dockerfile approach. One good example is someone who did a malboxes spin in it's C:\Users\<user> and launched it without realizing that it would expose all it's files to the VM. Safe malware analysis is not safe enough 😉. This needs more thoughts though.

[obilodeau]

I just reverted the commit. Let's keep this ticket open to track that we want to enable it once we have a good default profile (and perform backward compatibility testing).