[27952] in bugtraq
Re: When scrubbing secrets in memory doesn't work
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Moore)
Wed Nov 20 05:57:47 2002
Message-ID: <3DD91729.5000307@westpoint.ltd.uk>
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 16:36:57 +0000
From: Richard Moore <rich@westpoint.ltd.uk>
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To: Nicholas Weaver <nweaver@CS.berkeley.edu>, Michael.Wojcik@microfocus.com,
bugtraq@securityfocus.com
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Nicholas Weaver wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 02:44:58AM -0800, Michael Wojcik composed:
> The bigger concern is when the memory is paged to disk, and that
> record may have a much MUCH longer time window. But scrubbing has no
> real effect on this, this is an effect of VM memory management and
> memory-only pinning.
>
It's worth noting that on systems such as linux and solaris, it is easy
to avoid the paging problem by locking the process into memory. This is
accomplished using the system calls mlock(2) and mlockall(2). The former
is probably more suitable as the latter locks all of pages for the
process. This is of course outside the scope of the C (or other
language) definition.
Cheers
Rich.
