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How do you handle secrets in home automation? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Say you have a script or something that gets run in cron/task scheduler and it needs a password.. say to ssh to a raspberry pi elsewhere in your house.

How do you save that password in a way that automation can access it?

Some ideas:

  • Plaintext file. Not a fan because its sitting unencrypted on the box somewhere.
  • Environment variable. Not a fan because its still unencrypted somewhere to someone on the box (albeit likely the same user or an admin).
  • A secrets manager. If I use something locally like hashicorp vault or infisical, I can get to a point where a cli/api call gets the password. Though in this case I still need a vault password/secret to get my password. So I fall back to needing one of the above to get this to work.

If the secrets manager is easily available, the secret to get into the secrets manager is available as well leading to a feeling of security by obscurity.

If someone breaks into my system via SSH/etc. then they can get the passwords either way.

.. How do people normally do this? I'm not sure I actually get anything out of a secrets manager if its local and I have the disk itself encrypted before login.

What actually makes sense at a personal/home scale?

(Edit: I know using SSH key probably is better for getting to the raspberry pi, but still the question is the same idea).

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The problem is that would be so annoying/impractical. In an optimal world, yeah a person checking a prompt and approving could make sense, but in practice that would also mean that the MFA prompt would have to ask for the password anyways. (Or the password would be on the phone with the same problem as on the computer).

Can you imagine having to type a password on an hourly schedule or something? If the password was cached, we have the same problem again.