Suppose a Perl program, whether it be a fancy GUI application or a duct-tape style script, needs a password. How secure the password needs to be really depends on the application and the specific usage, but in general it ought to be stored "elsewhere", not in the script itself. It might prompt the interactive user, or read it from another file or media or system registry.

I'm thinking this can be made into a module. It should be simple enough to use from duct-tape scripts that run non-interactively, say $x= get_password("identifier") and some other utility program or config file can map what "identifier" does, whether store it directly, store it in protected media or non-file storage of some kind, prompt the user via low-Tempest GUI with integrated keyboard-logging spoofing, etc.

This decouples the script's need for a password and the security policy implementation.

Is anything like that around already?

Any thoughts on the concept or design?

—John

In reply to How about a module for "passwords"? by John M. Dlugosz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.