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.
I am not familiar with the software bubblewrap so I am just picturing your hard drives wrapped up inside your case.
The environment of other processes is readable in procfs.
/proc/PID/environ
Thanks to the permissions it’s read-only, and only by the user with which the process runs, but it’s still bad, I think
Don’t all programs run as the user anyways? That changes nothing on a single user machine
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.
But how do you authenticate to your secret manager? How do you prevent evil scripts from also doing this?
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 😅
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)"
No no see the credentials have been towed outside the environment.
The classic Unix user and permission system provides a solution for this.
Create a user for the app you are worried about. Make the environment variables available to that user only.
Other apps can’t read the secrets, and if the app itself gets exploited, it has access to the secrets in any case.
