On: Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your ...

[alexdean]

Wow, this is the only thing I've seen in this thread which doesn't just add another layer of turtles to the problem. With your suggestion, even if an attacker could gain access to the box, they wouldn't be able to get at the secrets. Is there any prior art/blog posts/software for this approach you could point me at?

[Someone → alexdean]

For the Mac OS X technology, https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Securi... is a good starting point.

I don't know of full open source equivalents. Parts of Apple's code are open source, though, for example http://opensource.apple.com/source/security_systemkeychain/s... (may not even compile; not all Apple's open source releases do)