Invocation of Process Using Visible Sensitive Information in argparse

PY027

visible_sensitive_information

CWE-214

⛔️ Error

---

Do not read secrets directly from command line arguments. When a command accepts a secret like via a --password argument or --api-key, the argument value will leak the secret into ps output and shell history. This also encourages the use of insecure environment variables for secrets.

Example

import argparse


parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
    prog='ProgramName',
    description='What the program does',
)
parser.add_argument(
    "-p",
    "--password",
    dest="password",
    action="store",
    help="password for the database",
)

Remediation

Consider accepting sensitive data only from an interactive hidden prompt or via files. A --password-file argument allows a secret to be passed in discreetly, in a wide variety of contexts.

import argparse


parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
    prog='ProgramName',
    description='What the program does',
)
parser.add_argument(
    "-p",
    "--password",
    dest="password",
    action="store_true",
    help="password for the database",
)

False Positives

In the case of a false positive the rule can be suppressed. Simply add a trailing or preceding comment line with either the rule ID (PY027) or rule category name (visible_sensitive_information).

Using rule ID

fix

import argparse


parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
    prog='ProgramName',
    description='What the program does',
)
# suppress: PY027
parser.add_argument(
    "-p",
    "--password",
    dest="password",
    action="store",
    help="password for the database",
)

Using category name

fix

import argparse


parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
    prog='ProgramName',
    description='What the program does',
)
# suppress: visible_sensitive_information
parser.add_argument(
    "-p",
    "--password",
    dest="password",
    action="store",
    help="password for the database",
)

See also

info

• argparse — Parser for command-line options, arguments and sub-commands
• CWE-214: Invocation of Process Using Visible Sensitive Information