I believe there's a small oversight in the idea that if someone has access to your box, that it's game over.
Think about a situation where a company may have a box with administrators and users. They may still want levels of security. For example, say you have a JDBCAppender that has a user name and password in their log4j2 configuration. The administrator may have access to their application and the database, but a user may only need access to the box. Therefore, having the user name and password hashed in the configuration file would ensure that a user (non admin) on the system can't get to the database. This is an interesting challenge since the password hash would have to be a symmetric algorithm. It's still merely only a light level of security since anyone with bad intent could still figure out the decryption by looking at the encryption algorithm. In my experience (supply chain development), some companies are pretty strict on having any password left in plain text, even if it is just for logging. Just a thought. Thanks, Kurt From: Nick Williams [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2013 11:18 AM To: Log4J Developers List Subject: Re: Track passwords internally as char[] instead of String I believe it's sufficient to simply *make sure* our code doesn't let these passwords from the configuration get into logs. I don't see it as necessary to add special password support, IMO. But I could be missing something. N On Aug 22, 2013, at 6:28 AM, Gary Gregory wrote: On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Nick Williams <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: This discussion comes up on the Tomcat mailing list at least every few months, and it always ends the same way. The passwords are in a configuration file. That configuration file lives with the application. So, for example, if the application is a web app the configuration file lives on the web app server or a server it has access to. Either way, if a hacker gets a hold of that configuration file, it's because they've breached your firewall/server protection systems and it's game over anyway. There's really no use in making efforts to protect passwords in these configuration files. Any effort to do so just adds a _false_ sense of security, which is more dangerous than no security at all. My concern is more in the other direction. When secrets are in String objects, they end up as plain text in log files or any kind of dump (if Strings are dumped with toString()). At work, we get different kinds of logs from users where the user has painstakingly blanked out certain data. Using char[] avoids saying giving in plain text your secrets when they are in Strings. In the case of Log4j2, this may never happen as the code stands now (do we have passwords in toString()s?)... Gary Nick On Aug 19, 2013, at 9:54 AM, Gary Gregory wrote: On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Gary Gregory <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Ralph Goers <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I'm not sure how this applies to what you are suggesting, but we should avoid passwords being in clear text in the configuration. I would suggest using a standard plugin interface similar to what I did with the secret key provider in the Flume Appender. We should at the last offer something like http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Howto/Secure_Passwords So perhaps we need a boolean password attribute on PluginElement and PluginAttribute Gary Gary Ralph On Aug 19, 2013, at 7:29 AM, Gary Gregory <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Paul Benedict <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Do you need the password ever after authentication? I guess it depends on whether the code handles re-auth in case of a disconnect. Gary On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 8:55 AM, Gary Gregory <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 7:27 AM, Ralph Goers <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: What passwords? For example: - org.apache.logging.log4j.core.net.SMTPManager.FactoryData.password - org.apache.logging.log4j.core.net.JMSTopicManager.password - org.apache.logging.log4j.core.net.JMSQueueManager.FactoryData.password Gary Ralph On Aug 19, 2013, at 4:22 AM, Gary Gregory <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I've seen it done many places: Should we track passwords internally as char[] instead of String for ivars. This prevents Log4j spilling your secrets by accident in a toString to internal log call. Gary -- E-Mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> | [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Java Persistence with Hibernate, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/bauer3/> JUnit in Action, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/tahchiev/> Spring Batch in Action<http://www.manning.com/templier/> Blog: http://garygregory.wordpress.com<http://garygregory.wordpress.com/> Home: http://garygregory.com/ Tweet! http://twitter.com/GaryGregory -- E-Mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> | [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Java Persistence with Hibernate, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/bauer3/> JUnit in Action, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/tahchiev/> Spring Batch in Action<http://www.manning.com/templier/> Blog: http://garygregory.wordpress.com<http://garygregory.wordpress.com/> Home: http://garygregory.com/ Tweet! http://twitter.com/GaryGregory -- Cheers, Paul -- E-Mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> | [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Java Persistence with Hibernate, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/bauer3/> JUnit in Action, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/tahchiev/> Spring Batch in Action<http://www.manning.com/templier/> Blog: http://garygregory.wordpress.com<http://garygregory.wordpress.com/> Home: http://garygregory.com/ Tweet! http://twitter.com/GaryGregory -- E-Mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> | [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Java Persistence with Hibernate, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/bauer3/> JUnit in Action, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/tahchiev/> Spring Batch in Action<http://www.manning.com/templier/> Blog: http://garygregory.wordpress.com<http://garygregory.wordpress.com/> Home: http://garygregory.com/ Tweet! http://twitter.com/GaryGregory -- E-Mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> | [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Java Persistence with Hibernate, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/bauer3/> JUnit in Action, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/tahchiev/> Spring Batch in Action<http://www.manning.com/templier/> Blog: http://garygregory.wordpress.com<http://garygregory.wordpress.com/> Home: http://garygregory.com/ Tweet! http://twitter.com/GaryGregory -- E-Mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> | [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Java Persistence with Hibernate, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/bauer3/> JUnit in Action, Second Edition<http://www.manning.com/tahchiev/> Spring Batch in Action<http://www.manning.com/templier/> Blog: http://garygregory.wordpress.com<http://garygregory.wordpress.com/> Home: http://garygregory.com/ Tweet! http://twitter.com/GaryGregory
