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Show HN: Laptop is the last place your secrets are still in plaintext

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Re: Show HN: Laptop is the last place your secrets are still in plaintext

#91
post #82
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you missed my "containerisation" point: if not restricted, every rogue package or agent has access to your full $HOME too. A secret is there to protect access to data you care about. If that data is there, well, not much achieved. Eg. imagine there's the source code for a service you deploy to AWS — rogue sw can modify it letting you unknowingly update it the next time (or why do you have those AWS keys anywa…

> I guess you missed my "containerisation" point: if not restricted, every rogue package or agent has access to your full $HOME too. A secret is there to protect access to data you care about. If that data is there, well, not much achieved. There can be multiple processes that might need access to a project root and thus you might still find utility in something like these even inside a container. In security, we cal…

Thanks for the lesson on what each of those technologies is: are you claiming they cannot be used to achieve the effect of disallowing access to a filesystem area for a process (like an agent)?

They have different default behavior (and levels of isolation), which is why I mentioned a few popular choices, but there is more (LXD and Incus, for instance).

As far as "following any form of rigour", that's exactly what's happening for many with a move to coding agents — one-shotted diffs are so big, that people cannot keep the focus and introducing a tiny one-liner (eg. one that copied your AWS secret to innocent-file.sig) would likely go unnoticed. So yes, even if you used a VCS and glanced over your dry run IaC output, you'd easily be fooled.

Caring about reducing impact of human "mistakes" (due to lack of attention), we also call that defense in depth.

Re: Show HN: Laptop is the last place your secrets are still in plaintext

#92
post #81
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your local development machine will have the source code or images or IaaC configuration that you push to GH/AWS — a rogue agent can just modify that and wait for you to authorize the next push. I'd also consider short-lived tokens "in-memory during use", even if 8h is not very short. If you have AWS keys but do not have anything you use them for, then yes, a tool like this will help. However, the tool seems to imple…

> Your local development machine will have the source code or images or IaaC configuration that you push to GH/AWS — a rogue agent can just modify that and wait for you to authorize the next push. Yes, but that's then concerning yourself with the remote state and thus the opposite of the sentiment you made when you said: > I find that I worry more about my local data compared to my remote data > I'd also consider sho…

I am commenting without researching this tool deeper than the original README, because I am curious about the answers from the author — before I invest in researching it. I did not see them answered in the README

That's what discussion is about, no? Or should I not ask questions before auditing and understanding the entire codebase?

I am not sure what assumptions was I making: can you point to one?

Re: Show HN: Laptop is the last place your secrets are still in plaintext

#93

Varlock solves many of these problems, and a lot more. Including having a built in credential broker - and works everywhere. Missing some easier DX around things that are typically detected from global files, but working on it.

Most of your comments on this site, including both of your comments on this thread, are differently-worded promotions of this one product. Please don't use the forum exclusively to advertise.
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