Why is it more unsafe to store your password in the URL of a git repo?

Question

As a comment on a response to this question, someone says:

It is not advisable to put the password in the URL for this file is saved on the .git/config . Is not safe, it is better to use ssh key

Why? Understanding the password will be visible if I type git remote -v, that it'll show up in my bash history, and that anyone with access to my machine would easily be able to get the password, why is it "better" to use SSH keys? SSH keys are no more secure assuming that someone has access to my machine -- the SSH keys are still stored on disk locally.

Answer 1

It's unsafe because it exposes your password a number of different ways.

1. Any user can see it in the output of programs like top and ps aux -www. They don't need to be root to see your processes.
2. It gets logged into your shell history, so if you do something foolish like chmod 777 ~, anybody and everybody can cat ~user/.history and view the password.

If case 2 occurs, then foolishness will give them access to your SSH private key. If your private key does not require a password then it is compromised. If it does require a password then it's not compromised (although they can attempt to crack it).

Let's assume that the user here isn't foolish, has a good understanding of Unix files and unix file permissions, and would never run chmod 777 ~ because the user is not a noob.

Anybody on the system can view the PS output of your command. Let's say you purchase web hosting from some small, insecure web hosting company. They give you a chrooted home directory on a shared server and allow you to access the server via SSH in addition to SFTP and FTP. Providing a password in the URL is a viable security vulnerability. SSH keys would totally prevent this because even though the user has access to the machine they do not have access to your private key.