There is -- you can expose a UNIX socket for serving credentials and allow access to it only from a whitelist of systemd services.

rcxdude 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

They would still exist in plaintext, just the permissions would make it a little harder to access.

	▲	otabdeveloper4 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		No, UNIX sockets work over SSL too. You can, theoretically, decompile the system memory dump and try to mine the credentials out of the credential server's heap, but that exploit is exponentially more difficult to do that a simple `cat /proc/1234/environ`.

That works on a single persistent box, but unfortunately, that means giving up on autoscaling, which is not so nice for cloud applications.

You can proxy the UNIX socket to a network server if you want to. You can even use SSL encryption at all times too.

lmz 2 days ago | parent [-]

Once it's networked you lose the "whitelist of systemd services" and it's then no different from any networked secret store.

	▲	otabdeveloper4 a day ago \| parent [-]
		No, this is a solved problem: https://spiffe.io/ You can do service attestation securely, even for networked services.