Re:Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
by geocar on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:43AM
(#8826339)
BEGIN {
$API = new Backend($ENV{credentials});
delete $ENV{credentials};
};
Re:Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
by icebraining on Friday January 02, 2015 @07:21AM
(#8826495)
A user process can start subprocesses under different users, without access permissions to the files owned by parent. The most obvious way to do so is to use sudo.
Re:Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
by geocar on Friday January 02, 2015 @04:27PM
(#8828652)
Using a setuid helper (even if it's called sudo) is still starting a program as root.
Re:Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
by icebraining on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:33PM
(#8828946)
Not necessarily; sudo on Fedora has CAP_SETUID instead of the setuid bit, so it doesn't actually run as root.
Re:Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
by ptx on Sunday January 04, 2015 @12:39PM
(#8835109)
But CAP_SETUID, unless I'm confusing it with something else, can be used to set the UID to 0 and thereby gain all the same privileges as if the program had been started as root, can't it? Presumably it has some advantage that I'm not getting – does it have to be combined with e.g. SELinux to be useful?
Re:Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
by TeMPOraL on Friday January 02, 2015 @07:02AM
(#8826456)
>> just start a server or an app with different env variables in the command line.
> Just reference a different config file on the command line.
Either of that seems to be able to be read straight from argv[0] of the process, so don't forget about cleaning that up.
Just reference a different config file on the command line.
>You don't want your config or keys to depend on an OS,or a language.
A path to a config file isn't an OS or language. The ini format is pretty widely supported.
>Finally Env variables can be restricted to a set of users,so third party process started with a different one cant access them.
This is exactly what filesystem permissions do for files already.