[maildb-devel] Re: DB authentication

[<li...@av...>]

> My question is: how do we authenticate to the database?
> ... 
> 
> Do we just put a 0400 file somewhere on the local filesystem that only
> root and the mail.local user (probably "mail" or "daemon" or ...?) can
> read that contains th DB username and password?  The only other way that I
> can think of would be to compile the DB username/pw in the mail.local
> executable, but that might make it vulnerable to "strings mail.local", or
> something along those lines.  Is there a standard way to do this kind of
> thing?  We're not trying to protect from root in this case -- we're only
> trying to protect from other users (right?) -- so I'm thinking that a 0400
> file might not be totally evil (one way to think of it: it's no less
> secure than 0600 /var/spool/mail/* mbox files).

That's one way to do it.  Another way that we used at A Former Company of 
Mine (Collective Technologies, Austin TX) was to do a simple encryption of 
the database username/password into a "keyring", and our perl subroutine 
that handled the database connection extracted/used that information.  It 
was more obfuscated than it was secure ... but we figured every little bit 
helped.  :-) 

 - Liza