nodejs. Protecting production environment variables in pm2 and docker?

Question

Software Deployment

When passing environment variables in pm2 or docker, an attacker, once on the server, can easily access them. For example, in pm2
, variables are cached and when pm2 is restarted, they are again available (substituted) in node.js as process.env . Is there any way to protect passed variables in production so that, for example, they are only spinning in the node.js process and cannot be simply accessed through bash, or by restarting pm2, I could not get the secret variables simply by console. log(process.env); pm2 restart myapp?

Answer 1

In such a situation, you should restrict the attacker's access to the server.
If such access is obtained, the "protections" you proposed will not help: an attacker can interfere with the application code and obtain the necessary data.