alt Hacker NewsThe unwritten assumption in 12 Factor is: the environment is secure. For example, a production system should always have a secure means of setting environment variables. Said another way: If a random dev can change an environment variable in production either directly by logging in or indirectly by pushing code then there is something very very wrong.
If the dev is pushing code to production they should not simultaneously be pushing environment configs, this is doing two logically distinct things at once: Changing application behavior AND reconfiguring the server environment.
If the dev is adding secrets to their local config and they’re pushing that config to insecure places that means their deployment pipeline is broken and it should be fixed. .env is never committed to source for this reason, for example.
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Unfortunately, with secrets in the OS env, you‘re one `printenv` or improperly written third party dependency that leaks env vars away from a security incident.
The env and more importantly what populates it should be secure, but security works best in layers. Sanitizing the env after loading it is a nicer middleground, k8s-style secrets materialized to files work best and are conceptually close enough to the OS env.
Adding on to what others say about printenv, various diagnostic tools (e.g. crash reporting stuff) will capture the environment. Env vars are just categorically so easy to accidentally leak that it can’t even be classed as an insecurity.
> Changing application behavior
Configuration changes also change application behavior, otherwise is it really “config”?
> The unwritten assumption in 12 Factor is: the environment is secure.
Fair assumption.
Assuming no attackers and you're only running trusted code, I still maintain the environment is a poor place to keep secrets. Devs adding `{ meta: process.env }` to logs. Instrumentation/reporting libraries dumping the process (and the env) for crash reports. Trust that subprocesses + dependencies inheriting your environment are taking equal care to avoid these issues, too.