Need to not hardcode username and password in a script 2

[netman4u]

Hello all,

I am writing a script that uses DBI to retrieve a list of router ip addresses from an Oracle DB and then log into each router and run a command and capture the output.

All well and good but I do not want to hard code the user names and passwords. Any way to have some type of encypted "shadow" file that retrieves the user names and passwords?

If there is no way I am thinking of using the Active State Perl Development kit to compile my code as a binary to run on Solaris 9. Anyone ever do that?

Thanks,

Nick

If at first you don't succeed, don't try skydiving.

 

[Kirsle]

You can use a reversible password-based encryption if only you and your program know the secret password to decode it.

I like Crypt::CipherSaber for this:

http://search.cpan.org/~chromatic/Crypt-CipherSaber-1.00/lib/Crypt/CipherSaber.pm

It uses RC4 encoding but it handles all the backend work of generating an RC4 key based on a password (since RC4 doesn't seem to encourage using textual passwords as the crypt key).

 

[netman4u]

Thanks Kirsle. That seems to be what I am looking for. In regards to usage, do I write a seperate script to encript my passwords once as in:

 # encrypt from and to a file
 open(INFILE, 'secretletter.txt') or die "Can't open infile: $!";
  open(OUTFILE, '>secretletter.cs1') or die "Can't open outfile: $!";
  binmode(INFILE);
  binmode(OUTFILE);
  $cs->fh_crypt(\*INFILE, \*OUTFILE, 1);

And then in my program decode it as in:

 # decrypt from and to a file
  open(INFILE, 'secretletter.cs1') or die "Can't open infile: $!";
  open(OUTFILE, '>secretletter.txt') or die "Can't open outfile: $!";
  binmode(INFILE);
  binmode(OUTFILE);
  $cs->fh_crypt(\*INFILE, \*OUTFILE);

Or am I resding it wrong?


If at first you don't succeed, don't try skydiving.

 

[Kirsle]

Yeah, you'd have one script to run once and encode the file. Decoding it into a plain txt file isn't very efficient, because it opens a small margin for somebody to go in and read the unencrypted data.

For reading the file data, it might be best to load the encrypted file into memory (a scalar would be most useful), then run $cs->decrypt on that data, so that the encrypted data is brought in and decoded without being written anywhere in plain text format.

 

[netman4u]

Thanks, it looks like this is what I am looking for.

If at first you don't succeed, don't try skydiving.