command line arguments are easily visible to other processes on linux

[detrout]

  (format "echo %s | \
           keepassxc-cli %s %s %s 2>&1 | \
           egrep -v '[Insert|Enter] password to unlock %s'"
          (shell-quote-argument keepass-mode-password)

It's pretty easy to read command line arguments on Linux so this method of passing the password leaks the keyring password to anything running on the host in question.

As a test I did this:

(shell-command-to-string "echo foo | ps aux")

user 356548 0.0 0.0 6968 3184 ? Ss 10:41 0:00 /bin/bash -c echo foo | ps aux
user 356550 0.0 0.0 10084 3288 ? R 10:41 0:00 ps aux

I don't know how to solve this in emacs lisp but ideally the password should be pushed to keepassxc-cli's standard in directly from emacs over a pipe.

(Environment variables also show up in /proc and so aren't the best method of IPC either.)

[amygrinn]

I solved this issue in my package keepass.el by using process-send-string. I hope to make a pull request to merge the two packages sometime, if anyone is interested in trying it out beforehand.