Please stop storing passwords in /etc ever. This is the default behavior. Unless someone explicitly requests that and is properly warned about about the consequences, it is generally not acceptable to have security relevant data stored on disk.
I hope you succeed in getting this fixed. A similar report in debian got shot down with ungodly speed (see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=647644 ) I don't understand the developer's idea of security - I quote: "Those passphrases are only readable by root resp users with admin privileges, so there is no user security hole. And you can certainly create connections, where the password is stored in the user session." 1) since we're talking wireless, we're probably talking about a laptop or other similar single-seat machine where the non-owner user can physically access the hardware; 2) therefore, protecting something with "root access" is no protection at all, since it takes all of 2 minutes for said single-seat user to boot a USB stick and access the CLEAR TEXT PASSPHRASES stored by network-manager in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections, then boot back into the normal system; 3) creating a non-system connection is NO PROTECTION since the network's owner would have to create the connection in each user's session, where said user can simply use seahorse to display the passphrase in clear text; 4) so the fallback answer would be "well then, encrypt your whole hard-drive"; and hopefully you're able to be present to enter the decryption passphrase everytime the local user reboots the machine! 5) I don't understand why even though the system takes pain to store users' passwords in hashed/encrypted form in /etc/shadow, that kind of security is somehow not needed for NetworkManager's secrets...
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Nemoinis, Your logic fails at step 5. With /etc/shadow passwords the computer is verifying the password. The user is entering it in plain text. Now think about getting a wireless network. The network AP is verifying the password. The client, aka your computer, must enter the password in plain text. So how can your computer give the password in plain text if it doesn't store it somehow? If having it live on disk in plain text is unacceptable we really only have 2 options. Encrypt the disk. Don't store the password on disk. Thus you'll have to enter it every time you want to get on Wifi. Not sure if NM offers that option, but I wouldn't use it even if it did *smile*
I guess a third option exists, storing them in the gnome keyring. But this means no network connections until after you log into the machine. I'd be fine with this for some of my machines, but not others...
So, how hard is to just encrypt somehow these passwords? This is still true in Fedora 20. Also, i suspect is also true for pppoe passwords.
You can't encrypt the passwords and store them system-wide because the plain text versions are needed to authenticate with the network. You could store them per-user in gnome keyring as suggested, and then they will be protected by the keyring pasword (usually the same as your user password). Let me guess, does a network you connect to require you to use your regular system/domain login password? Is it using PEAP? Because that is the real problem--wifi connections shouldn't be tied to system or domain logins and EAP-TLS should be used with per-device certificates instead. But since this isn't something a user could control, there should be a better option in NM to handle this case. Maybe the defaults for PEAP should be per-user-only and only allow system-wide connection configuration from the nm-applet after a big fat warning is displayed.
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