[akerl_]

Security is a spectrum. There's definitely a path for someone with full local access to the hypervisor and system memory to do some careful reconstruction or other malicious injection, but that attack vector is amazingly rare compared to attacks based on bad protocols for network traffic, bad app-level auth, and insecure storage practices (mixing code and creds, for example).

There's immense value in defending against the kind of attacks where an attacker gets partial access, even if an attacker with omnipotence can compromise you.

[Merkur]

Indeed! After all we live in a world where many ssl private certificates are only protected by OS file system rights on a internet facing server. And clear text database passwords in config files are common, in all content management systems - and even many customer relationship systems!

mysqldump got a CLI argument to provide the password! As far as I know - visible to anyone with some access on the system. the documentation warns about that and suggest to create a config file to store the password.

security is a spectrum - but if it's about password storage in modern web applications live on the lower end.

I am increasingly frustrated by that - and if I raise concerns many admins stick to binary security "storing stuff unencrypted on disk is okay, cause the attacker is inside already" followed by "you must store the key somewhere" it's wrong and it's true at the same time. it's also sad - because not only the users, but also the ppl paying us trust us to keep them save. and we don't. :( we can say "it's a spectrum" and we are truthful - but we just can't keep em safe. I think it's important to recognize that simple fact.

...or is it me who is just meticulous?