Comment by wonderfuly
9 hours ago
I'm a victim of this.
In addition to concerns about npm, I'm now hesitant to use the GitHub CLI, which stores a highly privileged OAuth token in plain text in the HOME directory. After the attacker accesses it, they can do almost anything on behalf of me, for example, they turned many of my private repos to public.
Apparently, The Github CLI only stores its oauth token in the HOME directory if you don't have a keyring. They also say it may not work on headless systems. See https://github.com/cli/cli/discussions/7109.
For example, in my macOS machines the token is safely stored in the OS keyring (yes, I double checked the file where otherwise it would've been stored as plain text).
Yes. KeePassXC is all you need on Linux to have a compatible secret store.
That's true, but the same may already be true of your browser's cookie file. I believe Chrome on MacOS and Windows (unsure about Linux) now does use OS features to prevent it being read from other executables, but Firefox doesn't (yet)
But protecting specific directories is just whack-a-mole. The real fix is to properly sandbox code - an access whitelist rather than endlessly updating a patchy blacklist
> But protecting specific directories is just whack-a-mole. The real fix is to properly sandbox code - an access whitelist rather than blacklist
I believe Wayland (don't quote me on this because I know exactly zero technical details) as opposed to x is a big step in this direction. Correct me if I am wrong but I believe this effort alone has been ongoing for a decade. A proper sandbox will take longer and risks being coopted by corporate drones trying to take away our right to use our computers as we see fit.
Wayland is a significant improvement in one specific area (and it's not this one).
All programs in X were trusted and had access to the same drawing space. This meant that one program could see what another one was drawing. Effectively this meant that any compromised program could see your whole screen if you were using X.
Wayland has a different architecture where programs only have access to the resources to draw their own stuff, and then a separate compositor joins all the results together.
Wayland does nothing about the REST of the application permission model - ability to access files, send network requests etc. For that you need more sandboxing e.g. Flatpak, Containers, VMs
Maybe I am missing something but how and why would a display protocol have anything to do with file access model??
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Plan9 had per-process namespaces in 1995.
One could easily allow or restrict visibility of almost anything to any program. There were/are some definite usability concerns with how it is done today (the OS was not designed to be friendly, but to try new things) and those could easily be solved. The core of this existed in the Plan9 kernel and the Plan9 kernel is small enough to be understood by one person.
I’m kinda angry that other operating systems don’t do this today. How much malware would be stopped in its tracks and made impotent if every program launched was inherently and natively walled off from everything else by default?
this, this, this
All our tokens should be in is protected keychain and there are no proper cross-platform solutions for this. All gclouds, was aww sdks, gh and other tools just store them in dotfile.
And worst thing, afaik there is no way do do it correctly in MacOS for example. I'd like to be corrected though.
What is a proper solution for this? I don't imagine gpg can help if you encrypt it but decrypt it when you login to gnome, right? However, it would be too much of a hassle to have to authenticate each time you need a token. I imagine macOS people have access to the secure enclave using touch ID but then even that is not available on all devices.
I feel like we are barking up the wrong tree here. The plain text token thing can't be fixed. We have to protect our computers from malware to begin with. Maybe Microsoft was right to use secure admin workstations (saw) for privileged access but then again it is too much of a hassle.
The way I solve the plain text problem is through a combination of direnv[1] and pass[2].
For a given project, I have a `./creds` directory which is managed with pass and it contains all the access tokens and api keys that are relevant for that project, one per file, for example, `./creds/cloudflare/api_token`. Pass encrypts all these files via gpg, for which I use a key stored on a Yubikey.
Next to the `./creds` directory, I have an `.envrc` which includes some lines that read the encrypted files and store their values in environment variables, like so: `export CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN=$(pass creds/cloudflare/api_token)`.
Every time that I `cd` into that project's directory, direnv reads and executes that file (just once) and all these are stored as environment variables, but only for that terminal/session.
This solves the problem of plain-text files, but of course the values remain in ENV and something malicious could look for some well known variable names to extract from there. Personally I try to install things in a new termux tab every time which is less than ideal.
I'd like to see if and how other people solve this problem
[1]: https://direnv.net/ [2]: https://www.passwordstore.org/
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It might be possible to lash up a cross-plaform solution with KeePassXC. It's got an API that can be accessed from the command line (chezmoi uses it to add secrets to dotfiles). Yes, you'd be authenticating every time you need a token but that might not be too much of a burden if you spend most of your time on a machine with a fingerprint scanner.
otoh I wouldn't do it, because I don't believe I could implement it securely.
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I think the correct solution is to use a keyring. On Linux there's gnome keyring and last time I worked on a IOS app there was something similar.
This does mean entering your keyring password a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Keyring
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For what it’s worth, the recommended way of getting credentials for AWS would be either:
1. Piggyback of your existing auth infra (eg: ActiveDirectory or whatever you already have going on for user auth) 2. Failing that use identity center to create user auth in AWS itself
Either way means that your machine gets temporary credentials only
Alternatively, we could write an AWS CLI helper to store the stuff into the keychain (maybe someone has)
Not to take away from your more general point
We need flatpak for CLI tools
This doesn't sound like a technical problem to me. Even my throw-away bash scripts call to `secret-tool lookup`, since that is actually easier than implementing your own configuration.
Also this is a complete non-issue on Unix(-like) systems, because everything is designed around passing small strings between programs. Getting a secret from another program is the same amount of code, as reading it from a text file, since everything is a file.
> no way do do it correctly in MacOS
What? The MacOS Keychain is designed exactly for this. Every application that wants to access a given keychain entry triggers a prompt from the OS and you must enter your password to grant access.
I'm also a victim of this. Last time I try and install Backstage.
Have you wiped your laptop/infected machine? If not I would recommend it; part of it created a ~/.dev-env directory which turned my laptop into a GitHub runner, allowing for remote code execution.
I have a read-only filesystem OS (Bluefin Linux) and I don't know quite how much this has saved me, because so much of the attack happens in the home directory.