VNC security: SSH tunnel from local machine to VM necessary?

Question

SETUP: Local Windows 10 machine. It runs a VM (Ubuntu Server, NAT, Virtualbox)

QUESTION: I want to make a VNC connection from my Local machine to the VM. Since VNC is not a secure protocol, it is recommended to make the connection through an SSH tunnel. However, since the VM is running on the same machine, I wonder if this is still necessary.

• Kain0_0: This is best asked in stack overflow, not software engineering. As for an answer, it depends. How much do you trust the stack of network infrastructure between your vnc client and the vnc server? There are numerous pieces of software on that path, are you comfortable with the risk that those pieces of software may be spying on you? Are you comfortable with the risk that those pieces of software could be compromised? How secure do you need this to be?

Answer 1

In this instance an SSH connection is not necessary. If someone unsavory can listen to network traffic between processes on a single machine, you've got more serious problems to deal with.

With that said, it might be a good idea to use SSH anyway as a matter of maintaining a habit of always encrypting connections, regardless where they're made.