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> Are there really common environments where the final product only gets run with less permissions than the package manager?

Yes, only running the final product in a VM/container is pretty common.

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And this is a very sensible precaution where developer environments have SSH keys and other privileged credentials available and exposed in predictable locations, ready for exfiltration over the unfiltered internet connection that developers insist on having available.

Hopefully the VM/container run environment is also in a network-isolated environment too, so it can only be accessed and invoked through the expected routes, and it can't make arbitrary network calls to external hosts that haven't been manually reviewed and approved.

The types of secrets ought to be a bit different and less consequential on a developer's machine. If they're not, that's a pretty big red flag. It's one thing to gain access to clone some repositories (e.g. ~/.ssh) but an entirely different thing to get production aws credentials. Not to mention all the other protections that should be in place that mitigate the fallout (for example: no pushes to main/master/prod branches, requiring status checks and reviews before merges, etc).

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