4 ms·

Just asking: If you pass security tokens via environment variables to the process, doesn't it make sense to delete them from within the process after they have

• eqvinox 3y ago
  Yes it would make sense, but no there is no way to actually ensure they have been deleted. A trivial but nonetheless very common case would be if your process is started with a wrapper shell script. But even just within your process, there is no guarantee at all against some random library (or the kernel) making a copy of the entire environment. If you want to pass secrets into a process at startup, I would strongly recommend passing a pipe as an additional open file descriptor (e.g. fd #4, but this FD number you can then put in an env variable) and writing it onto the pipe. It can only be read once, and you can control where the value propagates.
  • Zandikar 3y ago
    Damn, learning new tricks everyday, thanks for the tip.
  • yrro 3y ago
    Now if only someone would explain this to the authors of mongosh (which REFUSES to accept credentials in an environment variable and will ONLY read them from stdin or from argv...)