Bugtraq: Re: ps information leak in FreeBSD

["Crist J. Clark" <crist.clark () attbi com>]

On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 09:18:00AM +0000, Jez Hancock wrote:
[snip]

> It's annoying in that I see a lot of users running mysql with the -u and -p options:
>
> mysql -u user -p mypassword
>
> on the commandline, thinking that this info will not show up in ps listings when ps
> is run by other users.  Ho hum...
Any program that asks for a password on the command line should have
the common decency to overwrite/obfuscate it, along the lines of,

        case 'p':
                passwd = optarg;
                optarg = "********";
                break;

So that it doesn't show up in any "ps" output.

Of course, there is still a window of vulnerability before the code is
executed, but any long-lived daemon has no excuse for not doing this.
-- 
Crist J. Clark                     |     cjclark () alum mit edu
                                   |     cjclark () jhu edu
http://people.freebsd.org/~cjc/    |     cjc () freebsd org