Keeping Passwords Embedded In Code Secure?

JPyObjC Dude asks: "When designing any system that requires automated privileged access to databases or services, developers often rely on hard coding (embedding) passwords within the source code. This is obviously a bad practice as the password is then made available to anybody who has access to the source code (eg. software source control). Putting the passwords in configuration files is another practice, but it is still quite insecure as cracking hashed passwords from a text file is a trivial exercise. What do you do to manage your application passwords so that your system can run completely automated and yet make it difficult for hackers to get their hands on this precious information?"

Comments

Re:No answer

[FooAtWFU]

That said, salted hashes are pretty tough to crack. Changing the passwords regularly will make it unrealistic for a cracker to obtain the passwords through brute force.

I don't think this is really the problem - the problem is that you have something like, say, a fairly standard sort of command you might find in a MySQL database. You might get the strings from a config file, but you need to pass the password as plaintext:

mysql_connect('dbserver.foo.org','apache', 'z*UIYD!0');

or similar credentials.

And you know what? That's not secure. But then again, the database it's connecting to should be as firewalled as all get-out, and even if it's NOT firewalled, it should have host-based authentication so that you can only access it with that password from the appropriate machine (your web server). At that point, if someone can hook into your LAN to sniff traffic or spoof things, you're probably in deep trouble anyway - but perhaps you could configure the database server to only accept connections over a VPN of some sort with appropriate authentication certificates.

Re:The question is based on a false premise

[Nos.]

The problem with this is.... how does the program get the password it needs? If its encrypted with a salt...well, that's one way, so the program would have to do a brute force everytime it wanted to use that password.

There's little point to encrypting a locally stored password, as the decryption technique must be relatively simple to allow the program to access it. The idea is to secure everything around it, including the system that is being connected to. Use host based authentication, firewalls, etc. to reduce the risk.