Typesafe config: encryption/obfuscation of sensitive values in memory

Question

I have an Akka project that needs several passwords to work: to access a datastore, a distributed filesystem connection string...

Those values are not hardcoded in the configuration file, but rather pulled from a key vault at run time during app startup and then stored in memory in a typesafe config object as the thirdparty are using this configuration to get the password and open the connections.

I am just wondering if somehow this is risky, as I am guessing the strings would be in clear in memory. Is there a way to transparently obfuscate/encrypt the values ? Or do I need to implement it on my side, and update the thirdparties so that they transform the string before actually opening the connections.

Answer 1

In my opinion that is, in almost every application, a security risk you should not be concerned of. Since Scala runs on the JVM please refer to: Sensitive Data In Memory.