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Technical documentation for Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem
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CDSE auth security best practices #191

Open soxofaan opened 1 year ago

soxofaan commented 1 year ago

While reviewing some CDSE docs and notebook samples, I encountered some cases/snippets that establish poor security practices:

e.g. see eu-cdse/notebook-samples#11, eu-cdse/notebook-samples#12, eu-cdse/notebook-samples#13, #190, #192

The openeo Python library already provides functionality to write example/demo code without these kind of security pitfalls, however it is tightly coupled to working with an openEO backend.

I wonder if we should design a generic (non-openeo specific) Python package to simplify doing CDSE auth aspects and promote higher security standards.

willrayeo commented 1 year ago

@soxofaan If you are not using the openeo library, is there a short-term solution that can be used, while a generic python package is designed and developed? For example, is it better to suggest to users to input their credential from a text file stored locally or not take this approach at all?

soxofaan commented 1 year ago

The main issue to address is indeed avoiding that people have to copy-paste their main CDSE password verbatim in a notebook indeed. Loading it from an external (config) file is a possible solution, or using getpass functionality as wireframed in https://github.com/eu-cdse/notebook-samples/issues/13#issuecomment-1623444901

soxofaan commented 8 months ago

I just noticed this forum post https://helpcenter.dataspace.copernicus.eu/hc/en-gb/community/posts/17705912197021 which indicates that users are indeed putting their CDSE password in clear text in their scripts and source code, which eventually will end up in version control probably, or, god forbid, public github repos

soxofaan commented 8 months ago

already found a github repo with password exposed:

jamal919 commented 7 months ago

already found a github repo with password exposed:

Hi,

Thanks for catching it. I am not sure how this dev file went into online, but what is done is done. I have reset git history to erase it, and deleted the issue you created to erase any link to old/untracked blob.

Thanks again.