On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 02:41:40AM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Of course there many kinds of attack but if somebody shutdowns your box > and reads the infos from your memory there's something we can do about it: > Overwriting.... > Well my oppinion is still: If you modify the libs so that a call of free() > involves a overwriting of the memory all applications would transparently > use it. This would mean there's no need for a kernelpatch wich overwrites > free memory. But what if a application does not use free() before it got > terminated? in this case the informations would still lay around into the > memory.. > > if I'm wrong please correct me.. it's just that a slowdown is needed to > solve this (even partly).
Perhaps the ideal solution would be a hardware solution for people paranoid enough to need it. A simm that goes between the MB and the memory that, when MB power is lost, has its own backup battery and will immediatly overwrite the memory on main power failure. If the threat is that someone will come along and pull the power on a box and grab the memory, then having the OS overwrite memory whenever it is free doesn't address the memory in use at the time the power is pulled. I suppose you could have a daemon going along wiping unused memory when the system is idle without slowing down the system much, (make it very nice?), but it doesn't deal with in-use memory just before power down. I don't suppose the hardware memory controller either on the CPU or the chipset is at all programmable? It sounds like the ideal place to put this. Doug.
