Almost every program that we run has access to the environment, so nothing stops them from curling our credentials to some nefarious server.
Why don’t we put credentials in files and then pass them to the programs that need them? Maybe coupled with some mechanism that prevents executables from reading any random file except those approved.
The environment of other processes is readable in procfs.
/proc/PID/environThanks to the permissions it’s read-only, and only by the user with which the process runs, but it’s still bad, I think
Don’t all programs run as the user anyways? That changes nothing on a single user machine
A proper server should have one user per service.
Some have their own users, like gitlab