alt Hacker NewsWhat 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.
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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.
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.
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/