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I feel like people just think they should be doing all sorts of complicated stuff, and if they're not, they're somehow slacking off on security. You used to see the same thing with password hashes where people would write paragraphs about how they have salts and peppers and spices, passionately arguing for the necessity of each.

At the point where you're encrypting secrets in resident memory in a normal server program, you have gone fully into saffron-grade security. If you're worried about leaking secrets in your environment, overwrite the environment variable data and be done with it. In reality, if this is a real concern, unsetenv(3) is probably enough to avoid the actual attack vector --- a vulnerability where you leak environment variables qua environment variables (because you shell out or something).

Whatever vulnerability you're positing that leaks a secret out of arbitrary resident memory also leaks whatever secret you'd use to encrypt, and now you're not building a security system, you're building a DRM scheme. Don't let me yuck your yum on that, but: not a good ROI for security.

by zbentley8 hours ago|

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You're not wrong. My gripes above aren't a tacit accusation everyone is slacking off on security. I just wish we had standardized on better tools than env variables to make secrets a little more secure by default without requiring complicated stuff. But life goes on, most locks are more pickable than they should be, etc.

I do quibble with the statement that

> unsetenv(3) is probably enough to avoid the actual attack vector

It's not, because it doesn't modify the environment block of the process. Even if you use unsetenv, you're one path-traversal vuln away from folks being able to read all your startup-time secrets out of /proc/self/environ. Similar is true for exploits that can read process memory in small chunks: it takes time and risks detection to e.g. crawl around the stack/heap of who-knows-what-language to find interesting variables, but it's a lot easier to grab whatever's at the top of the stack by address (the env blob, which I think is also unmodified by most unsetenv(3) implementations). Path traversals and small-arbitrary-read exploits aren't exactly uncommon, and environment variables are the wp-admin/admin.php of exploit targets.

That's a quibble; you're broadly right, and that risk's not nearly severe enough to torture your code or bring in caching + encrypting runtime secret stores or whatnot.

I just wish env had been implemented without a /proc view and with reads requiring a cheap syscall rather than memory-residence, you know? Yeah, it's pointless to speculate about, but still seems like an obviously-preferable-in-retrospect road not taken.

"saffron-grade security" is pretty good, too.