How does pass solve this problem? Surely entering "command `pass accountdata`" has the same problem that the secret shows up in ps as command's argument.
A few comments on the actual article, which was a lot more insightful than I had thought:
- Protecting yourself from an audit logs is not really worth the effort, as the audit log should be treated as confidential as the secrets themselves.
- Utilities can themselves hide arguments, and will not show on the ps output. For example, `mysqlsh` shows as `--password=********`, as does `mysql`. I'm not 100% if modifying argv data has any effect on /proc, but then again, if you are protecting yourself from something that can access /proc (i.e. root), then nothing will work in the end. Protecting yourself from a rogue process that can monitor `ps` is also already a lost battle.
on Linux and all other Unix-like systems I know of, all users are allowed to list running processes and their command lines.
> Protecting yourself from a rogue process that can monitor `ps` is also already a lost battle.
ps is not a privileged command on most systems. POSIX says "On some implementations, especially multi-level secure systems, ps may be severely restricted and produce information only about child processes owned by the user."; "severely restricted" implies that this is not a common behavior.
furthermore, the article explains clearly how to hide secret arguments from ps. that's the main point of the article.