Migrate the msal-node-extensions to use @napi-rs/keyring instead of keytar

[kenotron]

Core Library

MSAL Node (@azure/msal-node)

Wrapper Library

MSAL Node Extensions (@azure/msal-node-extensions)

Public or Confidential Client?

Public

Description

Currently, the msal-node-extensions imposes a dependency on keytar. This is a cross-platform library that abstracts keystore. On Windows, this extension already handles credential persistence via the in-built Data Protection. On Linux, the keytar library depends on libsecret, which is then dependent on a dbus... this is not available in headless workloads like WSL2. A better approach is to utilize @napi-rs/keyring which is a thin napi-rs wrapper on top of the keyring-rs crate written in Rust. There, the secret store is implemented natively in Rust as well. https://www.npmjs.com/package/@napi-rs/keyring uses https://github.com/hwchen/keyring-rs uses https://github.com/hwchen/secret-service-rs ... this means that headless workloads can also use keystores with this implementation.

In addition, the author of the @napi-rs/keyring was recently awarded OSS fund from MSFT which means that the author is a credible source of quality code. I highly recommend us to move away from keytar.

Source

Internal (Microsoft)

[sameerag]

cc @bgavrilMS to consider this for msal-node

[TylerLeonhardt]

I think the other big motivating factor is that keytar is deprecated and unmaintained since 2022:
http://github.com/atom/node-keytar

MSAL should use a maintained package to store secrets. Especially when those secrets are auth tokens.

[kenotron]

Agreed, @bgavrilMS - Please make sure that this is prioritized, as there is a good story from Windows to use wsl2 for node.js & frontend devs

[rzhao271]

Because @azure/msal-node-extensions uses keytar, which has been unmaintained since 2022, we are now getting a Component Governance alert for the GitHub Copilot extension for VS Code due to keytar using string_decoder. Because keytar handles secrets and is not a devDependency, the following alert seems to be relevant: "[The string_decoder package] does not zero out memory before returning it, so it risks information disclosure".

I notice that the latest @azure/msal-node does not contain string_decoder, but the latest @azure/msal-node-extensions still does.
I would like @azure/msal-node-extensions to also move onto @napi-rs/keyring so that it along with all downstream projects can become more current and secure.