Re:Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
by alexatkeplar on Saturday January 03, 2015 @06:33AM
(#8830519)
Wow, this is the only thing I've seen in this thread which doesn't just add another layer of turtles to the problem. With your suggestion, even if an attacker could gain access to the box, they wouldn't be able to get at the secrets. Is there any prior art/blog posts/software for this approach you could point me at?
Re:Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
by Someone on Saturday January 03, 2015 @10:48AM
(#8830981)
For the Mac OS X technology, https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Securi... is a good starting point.
I don't know of full open source equivalents. Parts of Apple's code are open source, though, for example http://opensource.apple.com/source/security_systemkeychain/s... (may not even compile; not all Apple's open source releases do)
Disadvantage, of course, is that you will have to update the list of trusted callers whenever they change. Mac OS X automates that by automatically trusting binaries signed with the same key (trades some security for convenience)
Another disadvantage is that this doesn't work well with scripts (the kernel service would have to know how to find the running scripts in order to checksum them, for every possible scripting language on the system). Also, any form of extension support in a trusted application is problematic.