Other Directory Sites: SeekWonder | Directory Owners Forum
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:17:20 ADT
Andy Brown (Andy.Brown@nexor.co.uk)
Tue, 12 May 1998 12:26:18 +0100
Peter Gutmann wrote:
> [...]
> I covered the
> page locking problem briefly in my 1998 Usenix security symposium paper on
> secure random number generation, a more reliable way to try to avoid paging is
> to have a higher-priority background thread which touches the page
> constantly. However even in this case with NT's apparently nondeterministic
> paging behaviour it's not really possible to guarantee it won't be swapped.
Instead of trying to avoid paging, which seems to be impossible across Unix/NT
platforms, why not restrict it to a known secure area through the use of a memory
mapped file. i.e. set restrictive permissions on your directory and use a mapped
file within it to hold all sensitive data. At least then when you wipe it you'll know
for sure your password's never been in swap.
Regards,
- Andy
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:17:20 ADT