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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Isn't it weird that we put credentials in the environment? (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Almost every program that we run has access to the environment, so nothing stops them from curling our credentials to some nefarious server.

Why don't we put credentials in files and then pass them to the programs that need them? Maybe coupled with some mechanism that prevents executables from reading any random file except those approved.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have a rule that credentials in environment variables are to only ever be loaded as needed via some sort of secrets manager, optionally adding a wrapper script to do so transparently.

The whole point of passing secrets as environment variables is to avoid having things in files in plain and in known locations easy to scrape up by any malware.

Now we have people going full circle and slapping those into a .env file.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But how do you authenticate to your secret manager? How do you prevent evil scripts from also doing this?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I type my password, or on the work MacBook, TouchID. I'd imagine yubikeys would do too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You could decrypt a GPG key-based file to do that.

[–] _e____b 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd be very thankful for an example of your setup. I'm using Bitwardern for browser-related password management, but for convenience scripts I load the credentials as env vars at login through .bash_profile 😅

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Basically just have each sets of credentials in a script, and whenever you need to use something that needs a key, you source the script you need first.

Then each of those scripts are something like

export MY_API_KEY="$(bw get password whatever)"

[–] _e____b 1 points 1 year ago

thank you!