this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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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] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

In my opinion, for home selfhosted stuff you don't have to go for complex solutions. In the industry, the problem is that secrets needs to be served to different systems, by different people, with some kind of audit logs. Unless you are working with lots of people, environment variables are OK. You github/gitlab may have all scripts with variables, and your disk may have a .env file with mode 400. If you make any machine or container with a single responsibility, there should be no secret leaks among them.

For example, let say your wordpress instance gets pwned. It should only have its needed secrets (like its db credentials), so your wikimedia instance is still fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

On a completely unrelated side note: I like to see paralellisms of SOLID principles of OOP development and system administration.

A container may have one responsability. Or a service config (like nginx) may be closed to modifications but open to extensions, to avoid some automated client breaking elsewhere, etc, etc.

Sometimes I like to thing about system administration like some kind of very high level development.

spoilerTo mods: I have no problem to delete this comments if it doesn't fit this community