Is it possible to hide process args from 'ps -ef'??

[Chris Lewis]

In article <1414 at compel.UUCP> her at compel.UUCP (Helge Egelund Rasmussen) writes:
>It is possible to give Oracle programs the username/password on the 
>command line, ie : 
>    $ sqlplus scott/tiger

>This is all very nice, BUT when another user execute 'ps -ef' he/she 
>can see the password!

>Is it possible to hide the arguments, so that they won't show up in
>the 'ps' output (possibly by 'exec'ing sqlplus in some devious way :-)??

I don't know how bullet proof this is, or how portable, but on many
versions of UNIX you can overwrite the character strings that the
argv[] array points to.  Ie:

	main(...) {
	    char *p;
	    /* parse arguments */

	    for (i = 0; i < argc; i++)
		for (p = argv[i]; *p; p++)
		    *p++ = '\0';

You probably only have to zero the first byte in the argv[i] strings.

We used to do this to rename/hide executing game programs at a company I
used to work for.  BTW: BSD 4.1 accounting wouldn't even show jobs that
had a control character in their name ;-)

This doesn't help directly, because you presumably don't have source
to sqlplus, and this only works for the *current* process.

What you could do is something like the above, but after clobbering
arguments, pipe/fork/exec sqlplus, and stuff the password down the
pipe, then relinquish stdin to the terminal.  This, does still leave
a short window tho...

Frankly, if you're concerned about the password, you shouldn't do this
anyways - it becomes too tempting to put passwords in shell scripts...
-- 
Chris Lewis, Phone: (613) 832-0541, Internet: clewis at ferret.ocunix.on.ca
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