Tom Lane wrote:
>>At least in Linux, mysql replaces the password in the command line
>>argument with "xxxxxxxx" so you can't see them via "ps" nor via peeking
>>into /proc/<PID>/cmdline.
>
>>There is a short period where the password is visible though.
>
>>Are there any other risks? Or is the reason for not doing this is
>>because not all OS'es supports replacing the command line information?
>
> You just enumerated two fatal strikes against it; do you need more?
> If so, consider the question of where the password on the command line
> is going to come from. Allowing that would encourage people to put
> passwords into possibly-insecurely-stored scripts. Or, depending on how
> complicated the shell script is, there might be ancestor shell processes
> that also have the password visible in their arguments ... and they
> are certainly not going to know to xxx it out.
Yeah, I have some Perl/Ruby scripts that does "wget --proxy-user ...
--proxy-passwd ..." that reports the output through crontab and I have
to do the XXX-ing manually to prevent everyone that receives the cron
output to read the username/password. Should've stored the password in
~/.wgetrc too, I guess.
> The ~/.pgpass technique is secure on every Unix, and we can *check* that
> it's secure, by refusing to use .pgpass if it's got group or world
> access allowed.
I love the Postgres community. It's all about doing things _properly_. :-)
--
dave