[Wellington-pm] perl-suid deprecated, in favour of what?

[Grant McLean]

On Wed, 2006-05-24 at 10:34 +1200, Srdjan wrote:
> Grant McLean wrote:
> > Passing things via the environment is
> > non-obvious enough without also having to rely on some obscure entry in
> > the sudoers file.
>
> But what if you have sensitive data you don't want to be seen on the command 
> line, like passwords?

Yes, passing a password between processes via command line argument
would be insecure, since the command line arguments are visible via
'ps'.

On the other hand, passing a password between processes via the
environment would also be insecure, since a process' environment is also
visible via 'ps'.

Sending it into the STDIN of the child process via a pipe would be one
more secure approach.

Cheers
Grant