Weekly Journal 40 - aws-auth, Firefox Relay

Synopsis

Work and family life has occupied all my time this week, and I haven’t had a chance to do anything else. I did stumble over a couple of interesting tools I can share.

aws-auth

I can’t remember where I saw this first, but I tripped over a new (to me) tool for managing AWS credentials and authentication for command line tools. aws-auth is capable of managing your AWS credentials securely, has MFA support, and allows for easy switching of roles. It looks like it stores your AWS API keys in an encrypted file, and has a CLI tool that injects your credentials into your shell when you select one of your configured profiles.

I have been using aws-mfa in a similar capacity. It stores your keys in plain text in the ~/.aws/credentials file and I had to setup custom aliases to manage role switching, so it’s not as polished as aws-auth. As soon as things settle down a little I plan on taking this for a serious test drive.

Firefox Relay

I discovered recently that Firefox offers an email relay service. It allows you to create disposable email addresses that forward to your real address. Firefox Relay is useful when you aren’t sure you want to share your real address, like when you sign up for a mailing list. With a relay address, if it turns our the mailing list owner decides to sell your address to advertisers/spammers, it’s easy to delete that relay alias and prevent future junk mail from that source.

I have mixed feelings about using a service like this. I like the benefits, but this does expose all your relay emails to Firefox/Mozilla. With the recent announcement that Firefox will be showing ads in the search bar along with suggestions, I’m not sure I should trust Mozilla with the contents of my email. I’ll have to think about this one some more before I try it out.

What’s Next?

Hoping things settle down a bit so I can get back to my PKB project.