Environments tend to leak in places you don't expect. Mostly because they weren't designed to hold secrets in the first place. It's also another class of vulner

Environments tend to leak in places you don't expect. Mostly because they weren't designed to hold secrets in the first place. It's also another class of vulnerabilities applicable, where environment variables tends to be used for session data and can affect logging formats and other external integration points, generally in the web and perhaps specifically in the java ecosystems. Files on the other hand has access control as a primary feature. They carry meta data that makes it obvious which uid can access the data and which gets included with backups and storage. Apart from that, there are also possible encoding issues of secrets in environments. Secrets must be kept verbatim for integrity reasons better more suited for binary formats. Then there are the size restrictions. An environment of several kilo- or even megabytes seems plenty until for some ridiculous reason it's suddenly not, with not at all obvious results.