This seems to be a bad plan from the start. Writing passwords anywhere should be avoided. Anyone who can read the code that reads the password can probably just read the password for themselves.
A few questions:-
- Why would your application need to know the password? Does it become the account for certain actions?
- Could you not set up sudo access to allow people to become the account when they need to? This is auditable too.
- Is this a database account or something? You may be able to define it as authorised externally to the database, i.e. the DB trusts the OS validation.
- How would you use the password anyway?
It just seems a bad plan to me (sorry) and we may be able to find a better way that maybe even negates the need to have it changed regularly (i.e locked for password login entirely) so saving the Access Management team a task too.
I'm just confused and want to avoid building a service with exposures.
Robin
