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You may not make the system much more physically secure. But you would make
it more aggravating for an attacker to actually attempt to steal the
password. He would have to find the key for the file, find the code for the
encryption, determine any salts, and then expect that everything else was in
order. (You could modify a perl module that handles the encryption, just to
confuse an attacker. The attacker would not likely look at this code, but be
warned, this is security through obscurity and is not really security.)
Basically, it boils down to how bad does the attacker really want to break in
and how aggravating do you want to make it for an attacker?
I don't really know of any particularly good solutions for the problem other
than to keep the password stored in RAM, that is, to have the program running
in the background all the time. Not that this is a *good* solution, but a
solution option nonetheless. The main problem with this is that if your box
goes through a restart, you will have to manually enter in the password. I
don't really know what to tell you, and none of this may really help at all.
- -Joseph
On Friday 18 March 2005 1:18 pm, Jeff Robertson wrote:
Say that a perl script needs access to a database, and access to this
database requires a password. The script needs to run automatically with no
human intervention, so it is not possible to prompt a user to enter the
password at run time. This means that the password must either be in the
script itself or in a file readable by the script.
I have been asked what can be done to protect this password from falling
into the wrong eyes. My recommendation is to tightly control read
permissions to the script and/or the file that contains the password. Make
the file owned by a special-purpose user who only exists to run this
script, and chmod it to 600. That sort of thing.
It has been suggested to encrypt the password. Since the script needs to
get the clear text of the passwords in order to use them, this will need to
be symmetric encryption and the script will need to have the key available,
presumably stored in yet another file. As there would be no way to keep the
key from being stolen other than to use the file permissions that were
being relied on previously, you've just increased the complexity of the
system without actually making it any more secure. This is bad. You'd be
better off sticking with the simpler solution, since the security is the
same either way.
Can anyone either refute or provide further points in support of my stance
on this?
Jeff Robertson
Manager of Web Application Security
Digital Insight
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