innobackupex script shows the password in the ps output, when its passed as a command line argument

[Ovais Tariq]

innobackupex script shows the password in clear-text in the output of 'ps' command, when the password is passed as a command-line argument.

[Alexey Kopytov (akopytov)]

I don't see a way to fix this reliably. It is possible to change the process title that appears in ps output on some operating systems to hide the password. But:

- there will always be a relatively short period of time after the process is started and before the title is changed, when the password will still be visible in ps.
- it's not portable
- even after innobackupex changes the process title for its own process, it still calls the mysql command line client later with the same password on the command line, which has the same problem.

So it will just give a false sense of security, which is known to be even worse than a lack of security.

The only alternative to not have the password visible in ps is to add it to my.cnf and use that file with innobackupex. In case the configuration file containing the password must have different access attributes than the main my.cnf, the solution proposed in bug #740489 should work (which is a feature request for addition configuration file to be passed as --default-extra-file).

[Baron Schwartz (baron-xaprb)]

One solution to a lot of the problem is to remove the madness of shelling out to 'mysql' as a sub-process, and use DBD::mysql instead.

We'd probably fix about 20 other bugs, known and unknown, if we did this. And the amount of work we've spent fixing things like mysql timeout bugs has already been more than it would take to just switch to using DBD::mysql like sane programmers do. I assume that the original design was due to some misguidance from a lawyer about GPL following a protocol or something like that :)

[Alexey Kopytov (akopytov)]

Baron,

On 22.12.11 21:03, Baron Schwartz wrote:
> One solution to a lot of the problem is to remove the madness of
> shelling out to 'mysql' as a sub-process, and use DBD::mysql instead.
>
> We'd probably fix about 20 other bugs, known and unknown, if we did
> this. And the amount of work we've spent fixing things like mysql
> timeout bugs has already been more than it would take to just switch to
> using DBD::mysql like sane programmers do.

I agree, and for proper Windows support we will have to go further and
convert innobackupex to C/C++, which will fix even more known and
unknown bugs.

[Hartmut Holzgraefe (hartmut-php)]

Now that things have been ported to C/C++, and that the mysql command line client tries to overwrite password data, use the same technique to overwrite it in xtrabackup/innobackupex ps output, too:

https://github.com/percona/percona-xtrabackup/pull/289

[Shahriyar Rzayev (rzayev-sehriyar)]

Percona now uses JIRA for bug reports so this bug report is migrated to: https://jira.percona.com/browse/PXB-585