[rcxdude]

They would still exist in plaintext, just the permissions would make it a little harder to access.

[otabdeveloper4]

No, UNIX sockets work over SSL too.

You can, theoretically, decompile the system memory dump and try to mine the credentials out of the credential server's heap, but that exploit is exponentially more difficult to do that a simple `cat /proc/1234/environ`.