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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Isn't it weird that we put credentials in the environment? (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The environment of other processes is readable in procfs.

/proc/PID/environ

Thanks to the permissions it's read-only, and only by the user with which the process runs, but it's still bad, I think

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Don't all programs run as the user anyways? That changes nothing on a single user machine

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A proper server should have one user per service.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

yay password rotation month

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Service users generally don’t have passwords

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You don't login as service users, they're just a means of taking advantage of the user separation features. They have the login shell set to /bin/false typically.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not /bin/nologin/?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

From a quick search I've just done, the major difference is that /bin/false can't return any text, the only thing it can do as specified via POSIX standards is return false.

So if you set someone's shell to /bin/nologin there can be some text that says "You're not allowed shell access", similar to what happens if you try to SSH into say GitHub.

Of course, for a service account that won't be operated by a person, that doesn't matter - so whichever one you use is just whichever the operator thought of first, most likely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

true dat; false trends to CVE vs nologin

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Some have their own users, like gitlab