Edgar Friendly wrote:
> I was re-reading the paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and
> Solid-State Memory"[1], and this section caught my attention.
>
>> The most practical solution to the problem of DRAM data retention is
>> therefore to constantly flip the bits in memory to ensure that a
>> memory cell never holds a charge long enough for it to be
>> "remembered". While not practical for general use, it is possible to
>> do this for small amounts of very sensitive data such as encryption
>> keys. This is particularly advisable where keys are stored in the
>> same memory location for long periods of time and control access to
>> large amounts of information, such as keys used for transparent
>> encryption of files on disk drives. The bit-flipping also has the
>> convenient side-effect of keeping the page containing the encryption
>> keys at the top of the queue maintained by the system's paging
>> mechanism, greatly reducing the chances of it being paged to disk at
>> some point.
>
> Don't put this any higher than very low priority, but a non-toad could
> do this easily. I just wanted it in the list archives before I forgot
> about it.
>
> Thelema
>
> [1] http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
Well, if we are getting paranoid already. How about rather than deleting temp
files/blocks
from the datastore we allow to move them to another directory on the same hard
disk. Then
the scheduled task can be set up to wipe those files.
- Volodya
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