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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for writing this, really insightful! A question: What's your advice on how to store secrets on the server-side?

Currently, I mainly use a seperate "secrets.yml" file that gets deployed via Ansible and is stored there encrypted using Ansible-Vault with a strong password. Is that a reasonable approach? What is your opinion about storing secrets in environment variables? It seems that some people advise this over storing them in files, but I have seen some cases where environment variables can be exposed to the web client as well.

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I don't like the idea of keeping secrets in ENV and limiting it to config, though it's the kind of thing I'd ask other folks about myself to understand any tradeoffs. I see Kubernetes and other things supporting secrets in env variables so unsure how common it is.

The big win is simply keeping secrets out of source code, out of an general engineer's copy/paste buffer, and with errors not going to a logging platform with single factor access. Your likelihood of a short term incident decreases dramatically. Especially if those secrets have well segmented access, (IE, not a single AWS key with `AdministratorAccess` everywhere).

If your code adopts a convention of reading secrets from the environment, you get a lot of flexibility in how they're actually stored; you can put them in protected files and export the contents of the file before running the service, or you can have a tool that works like "env" that populates from a secret store. Your secret storage system can get more sophisticated without your code having to change.

I wouldn't recommend putting them in /etc/environment or /etc/profile or /home/service/.profile where you'll forget about them, though.

Just as a strategy for passing secrets to code, I like the environment a lot.

Article and discussion re storing secrets in environment variables: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8826024

The gist seems to be that it's easy to accidentally leak environment variables (which is why I think the top comment is off-base). tptacek, do you think this risk is overblown?

It's good to be aware of the fact that environments are inherited by child processes (as are file descriptors), but I don't think that's a good reason to avoid using the environment.

Have you heard of torus.sh keyrings? I don't know how well it works for an organization, but integrating torus into my side projects has been painless.

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