On Wed, Jan 19, 2000 at 02:20:47PM -0500, Noel L Yap wrote:
> IMHO, there should be some effort to try to prevent this sort of attack. The
> gist of the attack is that private keys can be recovered by reading a process's
> memory. I haven't really researched the preventive measures.
>
> Noel
It would be cool to support hardware key management solutions, but can't we
use locked memory on systems that support it so that you'd have to be root
to read the keys? In addition, we could encrypt the keys on disk, ask the
user for the passphrase every time we read the key so we don't have to keep
the passphrase around too long, and clear the key from memory as soon as we
can. This still won't let us hide from root, but it keeps the probability
of intercept low.
--
Sean R. Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.literati.org/~seanl/
Finger for public key. 540F 19F2 C416 847F 4832 B346 9AF3 E455 6E73 B691
C is a portable assembler. C++ is a nonportable assembler with bloat.
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