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Microsoft Teams stores auth tokens as cleartext in Windows, Linux, Macs
(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2022
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No, it cannot because apps cannot just reach into memory of other apps and keychain access has permissions per application.
How does the keychain know what "application" is calling it?
If set up properly then each application has its own private store that it registers with the keychain. This isn't exactly rocket science.
Do you have links to "set up properly". The problem is that for most systems other than maybe some of the "app store" type setups the OS has not concept of "application". The credentials are just the user and that is the same for all unsandboxed apps.
Here's an example of controlling access on per application basis with macOS keychain. The basic concept here is that the OS controls access to sensitive data, and applications can have individual stores associated with them. This allows control over what application can access a particular piece of data in the store.
That just seems to be about granting an app access to all keys, which is not quite the same as per-app keys.
I know that macOS has this for sandboxed apps from the app store, maybe they have it for "sideloaded" apps as well but at least most OSes don't have that. At least for Windows and Linux there isn't a good way to identify an "app" to separate it from any other. My macOS knowledge is rusty but IIRC you install apps in a system-owned directory and apps only have permission to update themselves so maybe you could use the application path as a key, but the other listed affected OSes don't have that.
I'm not familiar with windows, but here's an example of how secrets management works on Linux.