Security: Use OS keychain or encryption for storing credentials in config file instead of plain text

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
go
Domain
authentication, cli, security

Research direction

Start in pkg/config/localconfig.go by tracing how AuthToken, RefreshToken, and ClientSecret are serialized to and loaded from the YAML configuration. Evaluate the proposed OS keychain integration and 0600 fallback, then verify that secrets are not stored in plain text and remain available in the loaded configuration.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

component/cli keep-open
Describe the bug

Following up on a comment from https://github.com/microcks/microcks-cli/issues/503#issuecomment-5312648283 by @Harsh4902, the CLI currently stores credentials in the local configuration file in plain text.

Specifically, looking at pkg/config/localconfig.go, the LocalConfig struct stores AuthToken and RefreshToken inside the User struct, and ClientSecret inside the Auth struct. These are serialized directly to a YAML file (typically ~/.config/microcks/config).

If the file permissions on the config file are not strictly locked down, or if a malicious script gets read access to the user's home directory, these credentials can be easily stolen.

Expected behavior

CLI tools typically avoid storing access tokens, refresh tokens, and client secrets in plain text. Instead, we should consider:

  1. Using the operating system's native secure keystore/keychain (e.g., macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, Linux Secret Service) using a library like zalando/go-keyring or 99designs/keyring.
  2. As a fallback, strictly enforcing 0600 permissions on the config file so that only the file owner can read it (though native keystore is much preferred).
Actual behavior

No response

How to Reproduce?

No response

Microcks version or git rev

No response

Install method (docker-compose, helm chart, operator, docker-desktop extension,...)

No response

Additional information
Proposed Solution
  1. Integrate a keychain library like github.com/zalando/go-keyring.
  2. When saving a configuration (in pkg/config/localconfig.go), extract AuthToken, RefreshToken, and ClientSecret from the struct.
  3. Save these extracted secrets securely into the OS keychain, using the server name or user context as the service key.
  4. Replace the struct values with a placeholder (e.g., keychain-stored) before writing the remaining configuration to the YAML file.
  5. When reading the configuration, dynamically fetch the secrets from the keychain back into the struct.
Impact

Storing credentials securely will prevent local token theft and align microcks-cli with industry best practices for CLI security.

Dominant language
Go
Stars
59
Forks
74
Avg merge
4d 5h
Merged PRs (30d)
15

Getting set up

First steps

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  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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