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.
cizra ( @cizra@lemm.ee ) 50•11 months agoEnvironments are per-process. Every program can have its own environment, so don’t inject secrets where they’re not needed.
I’m using bubblewrap to restrict access to FS.
ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) 21•11 months agoThe 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
Lojcs ( @Lojcs@lemm.ee ) 7•11 months agoDon’t all programs run as the user anyways? That changes nothing on a single user machine
hansl ( @hansl@lemmy.ml ) English15•11 months agoA proper server should have one user per service.
PuppyOSAndCoffee ( @PuppyOSAndCoffee@lemmy.ml ) 1•11 months agoyay password rotation month
fahfahfahfah ( @fahfahfahfah@lemmy.billiam.net ) English7•11 months agoService users generally don’t have passwords
lemmyvore ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English3•11 months agoYou don’t login as service users, they’re just a means of taking advantage of the user separation features. They have the login shell set to /bin/false typically.
yum13241 ( @yum13241@lemm.ee ) 2•11 months agoNot
/bin/nologin/
? russjr08 ( @russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net ) English3•11 months agoFrom a quick search I’ve just done, the major difference is that
/bin/false
can’t return any text, the only thing it can do as specified via POSIX standards is returnfalse
.So if you set someone’s shell to
/bin/nologin
there can be some text that says “You’re not allowed shell access”, similar to what happens if you try to SSH into say GitHub.Of course, for a service account that won’t be operated by a person, that doesn’t matter - so whichever one you use is just whichever the operator thought of first, most likely.
PuppyOSAndCoffee ( @PuppyOSAndCoffee@lemmy.ml ) 1•11 months agotrue dat; false trends to CVE vs nologin
30p87 ( @30p87@feddit.de ) 4•11 months agoSome have their own users, like gitlab
Max-P ( @Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ) 24•11 months agoI 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. selawdivad ( @selawdivad@lemm.ee ) 2•11 months agoBut how do you authenticate to your secret manager? How do you prevent evil scripts from also doing this?
Max-P ( @Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ) 2•11 months agoI type my password, or on the work MacBook, TouchID. I’d imagine yubikeys would do too.
staticlifetime ( @staticlifetime@kbin.social ) 1•11 months agoYou could decrypt a GPG key-based file to do that.
Lowkeylyes ( @Lowkeylyes@infosec.pub ) 22•11 months agoNo no see the credentials have been towed outside the environment.
Albbi ( @Albbi@lemmy.ca ) 9•11 months agoThe frontend fell off!
erwan ( @erwan@lemmy.ml ) 11•11 months agoIf you run a binary written with bad intentions, you’re doomed anyway.
This is the security model we have currently.
bruce965 ( @bruce965@lemmy.ml ) 10•11 months agoI suppose in a well configured Docker or Kubernetes environment this doesn’t matter that much. Also, in Kubernetes, “secrets” can be passed as read-only files.
PuppyOSAndCoffee ( @PuppyOSAndCoffee@lemmy.ml ) 7•11 months agoCRED=$(fancy-get-cred) do-stuff
do-stuff
has${CRED}
but nothing else does. wrap in a shell script. GBU_28 ( @GBU_28@lemm.ee ) English5•11 months agoGlobal credentials are yuck
conciselyverbose ( @conciselyverbose@kbin.social ) 4•11 months agoWhat’s the goal?
There are extra steps you can take to try to improve the security against malware, but using environment variables instead of hard coding isn’t really intended for that, I don’t think.
It’s just to stop accidental leaks with stuff like git and other code sharing.
catchy_name ( @catchy_name@feddit.it ) English3•11 months agoCyberArk is a commercial product that attacks this problem space. It puts an agent process on the host next to your app. Only processes whose fingerprint matches those authorized to access a credential are allowed to fetch it. That fingerprint can be based on the host (known list of production hosts), the os user ID that owns the pid, the path to the executable for the pid, and probably a few more items.
Under that model your app just needs to know the environment that it wants (inject however you want) and the userid it wants to use. At runtime it reaches out to the local cyberark agent to obtain the password secret.