Re: FW: [ppa-dev] Severe bug in debian - phppgadmin opensup

> Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> > We can hide it but it will be visible for a short period, and many
> > operating systems either don't allow us to modify the ps args or have
> > ways of circumventing custom ps display, i.e. it doesn't show updated ps
> > display if the process is swapped out because ps can't get to the
> > user-space definitions of the custom args.
> 
> Yes, passwords in command-line arguments are *way* too dangerous.
> 
> I had always thought that environment vars were secure, though, and was
> surprised to learn that there are Unix variants wherein they're not.
> 
> I still like the idea of arguments and/or env vars that give the name
> of a file in which to look for the password, however.  Perhaps the file
> contents could be along the lines of
> 
>     username    host    password
> 
> and libpq would look for a line matching the PGUSER and PGHOST values it
> already has.  (compare the usage of .netrc, .cvspass, etc).  Maybe there
> could even be a default assumption that we look in "$HOME/.pgpass",
> without having to be told?  Or is that too Unix-centric?

TODO updated:

* Add PGPASSWORDFILE environment variable or ~/.pgpass to store user/host/password combinations

--  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610)
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