Almost every program that we run has access to the environment, so nothing stops them from curling our credentials to some nefarious server.
Why don’t we put credentials in files and then pass them to the programs that need them? Maybe coupled with some mechanism that prevents executables from reading any random file except those approved.
I suppose in a well configured Docker or Kubernetes environment this doesn’t matter that much. Also, in Kubernetes, “secrets” can be passed as read-only files.