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Had to read to the end of the description of why environment variables are bad to discover that it is effectively an advertisement for Docker. I don't use Docker so the article told me pretty much nothing that wasn't fairly obvious already, although it is a valuable reminder.
As for secret storage: didn't we solve this problem with keyrings? If I must put a secret in long-term plaintext storage, I might as well put it in a file, where I can see, access-control it, and audit it. Where's the audit log for someone reading an environment variable value?
1. Using docker-secret inside of a Docker swarm
2. Using Keywhiz [1], a Java server together with a FUSE client.
This seems overkill for a lot of cases. If environment variables are such a security problem, why not just use a config file (not checked into the source code repository) with proper permissions set?
[1] https://developer.squareup.com/blog/protecting-infrastructur...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's way better than hard coding them into the code.
Why is that? Also, as an aside: The very premise of plaintext credentials for computer-computer database connections always seemed strange to me. Maybe I'm just not knowledgeable enough here, but I wish the standard for database credentials was key-based.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's way better than hard coding them into the code.
Why is that? Also, as an aside: The very premise of plaintext credentials for computer-computer database connections always seemed strange to me. Maybe I'm just not knowledgeable enough here, but I wish the standard for database credentials was key-based.
Bigger companies also may have different compliance restrictions which means developers don't get access to production, only the Administrators.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's way better than hard coding them into the code.
Why is that? Also, as an aside: The very premise of plaintext credentials for computer-computer database connections always seemed strange to me. Maybe I'm just not knowledgeable enough here, but I wish the standard for database credentials was key-based.
Injecting via secrets allows us to tightly control where the secret goes and who has access as well as make it easy to tumble.
- make sure to sanitize the environment before spawning any child processes.
- Be sure to `set +x` (or your shell's equivalent) in your CI process
- that your secrets never get interpolated into a string through your scripting language.
What's a best practice that doesn't use this Docker-specific feature ?