manage dbshell with mysql give the password on the command line, visible system wide

[nirgal]

Hi

When using mysql backend, when one runs the dbshell command, subprocess.call() uses the mysql command line argument --password. This is insecure on multi-users systems, since anyone who can do "ps" is able to see the password.

I believe it would be much better to write the password in the temporary configuration file whose name is given using --defaults-extra-file=file_name, in a way similar to ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/4392

[Rigel Di Scala]

Cannot replicate this using Python3 and the "mysqlclient" connector package.

[Tim Graham]

dbshell ​makes a subprocess call with --password. Did you find that process?

[Rigel Di Scala]

Using Python 2.7 and MySQL-Python, when running manage.py dbshell and checking the output of ps aux, I see:

zedr      5604  0.0  0.0 110204  4748 pts/0    TN   08:30   0:00 mysql --user=root --password=x xx --host=127.1 django_testing

The password was, in this case, "root", so it's being obfuscated.

[Rigel Di Scala]

See: ​http://www.lenzg.net/archives/256-basic-mysql-security-providing-passwords-on-the-command-line.html

[Tim Graham]

Thanks for investigating. I guess we can mark this as invalid.

[Mariusz Felisiak <felisiak.mariusz@…>]

In 384ac099:

Refs #32061 -- Prevented password leak on MySQL dbshell crash.

The usage of the --password flag when invoking the mysql CLI has the
potential of exposing the password in plain text if the command happens
to crash due to the inclusion of args provided to
subprocess.run(check=True) in the string representation of the
subprocess.CalledProcessError exception raised on non-zero return code.

Since this has the potential of leaking the password to logging
facilities configured to capture crashes (e.g. sys.excepthook, Sentry)
it's safer to rely on the MYSQL_PWD environment variable instead even
if its usage is discouraged due to potential leak through the ps
command on old flavors of Unix.

Thanks Charlie Denton for reporting the issue to the security team.

Refs #24999.