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by metadat 1510 days ago
Then I'll just pull it from the processes memory directly. It's security through obscurity at best.
2 comments

It seems to me in line with the comment that the post quoted:

> Ultimately, secrets need to live somewhere and need to be accessed as plain text. Just make sure that the access as small window is as [sic] possible, and try to obliterate it after use, if possible.

This is not an all-or-nothing situation; it's a game of mitigation. If the process needs to retain the secret in memory, true, there's not much you can do about that. But I don't think that minimizing where else you're storing it is just security through obscurity. Fewer possible attack vectors is still fewer possible attack vectors.

Now, if you encrypt them in memory, or even better obtain the creds in an audited fashion, use them and clear the memory promptly, it's slightly better.
Just an arbitrary file read vulnerability away at /proc/$pid/mem