Last month I wrote about How to store and use webservice keys and authentication details, a summary of the options mentioned in a twitter discussion started by Jennifer Bryan.
All of the options in my article really stored the secrets in plain text somewhere on your system, but in such a way to minimize the risk of accidentally publishing the secrets.
Since then, I’ve had several comments (via twitter as well as the blog comments), about alternative options to really store your keys securely:
Using an encrypted disk
The first solution is to use an encrypted disk for the storage. As long as the encrypted disk is mounted, you work with the contents as if it is available in plain text. Thus, from the point of view of the R user, you simply store your secrets in “plain text” somewhere on the encrypted disk.
Using the digest package
The second alternative is to use the digest package… Continue reading
