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Environment Variables are NEVER private. Please don't think that you can hide information in there as all of that information ends up in the process table which
by huslage 10y ago
Environment Variables are NEVER private. Please don't think that you can hide information in there as all of that information ends up in the process table which is public across the entire machine.
- nnutter 10y agoHow are they "public" across the entire machine?
- phil21 10y agoI suppose it depends on your definition of public. Any environment for a process will be accessible via /proc/<pid>/environ on a linux system. Of course other users cannot read these files, however in the case of something like a Docker image all processes likely share a username and this could be a risk (especially for a public webapp that one day may information leak/allow remote command execution). At least that's my immediate take on it.
- nathanboktae 10y agoAnd the machine (vm) runs in a private VPC. So it's private.
- zeroxfe 10y agoWait, what? How do environment variables end up in the public part of process table? There's no way one user can peek into the environment of another (without permissions, notwithstanding bugs) -- that's part of the design of Unix systems.