I prefer to pass secrets between programs through standard input

> Unfortunately you're using a browser (or client library) that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious because it's sending inconsistent values for Sec-CH-UA-* HTTP request headers...

The world doesn't exclusively use Chrome. Nice to see even the nerds are contributing to the closed web.

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For one of my projects my server needs a private key, and it reads this from a file descriptor on startup and then closes the fd. The fd is set up by the systemd unit, which is also configured to restrict filesystem access for the server. So the server reads a key from a file that is never visible in its mount namespace.

I used to do that, I had a sort of IDE that launched a local server, bound to localhost.

The launching process would send a random password through stdin to the child after launch, and the child would use that to authenticate the further RPC calls.

It's surprisingly hard to intercept a process' stdin stream.

I haven't actually tested this, but aren't the input and output handles exposed on /proc/? What's stopping another process from seeing everything?

Interesting approach. I like Docker/Kubernetes way of secret mounts where you can limit user/group permissions too.

Meanwhile, I was an avid user of the echo secret | ssh consume approach, specifically for the kerberos authentication.

In my workflow, I saved the kerberos password to the macOS keychain, where kinit --use-keychain authenticated me seamlessly. However this wasn't the case for remote machines.

Therefore, I have implemented a quick script that is essentially

    security find-generic-password -a "kerberos" -s "kerberos-password" -w | ssh user@host kinit user@REALM

linux has a key api that works pretty well

man keyctl