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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:17:25 ADT
geeman@best.com
Sat, 16 May 1998 10:26:10 -0700
At 01:30 PM 5/16/98 -0400, Vin McLellan wrote:
>
<deleted>
>
> <geeman@best.com> suggested another worst-case senario:
>
>>What's amusing about this is that not only is the passphrase or whatnot out
>>there on the drive because of swapping, but, hmmmm... wonder what **DATA**
>>is out there that you wish/thought/imagined you encrypted?
>
> Data, I think you'll find, is covered, even on swap ;-] (Jing,
>please feel free to correct me on details.) SecurPC uses RSA's Fastcrypt
>library -- which was used for years for RSADSI's internal records, btw,
>before someone thought to add a GUI and market it. There seems to be no
>chance that the intermediate plain-text would get swapped out. First of
I never said anything about intermediate; I'm saying there are cleartext
data remnants all OVER the place from applications and the paging that has
occurred during their use; these extents are essentially randomly placed
and could contain anything from any time, altho with the probability of
finding any specific piece of data tending to 0 as time passes.
>all, because the memory is being actively used (so it doesn't get swapped
>out by Windows or other OS's during an encryption operation.) Secondly, as
>SecurPC is implemented, the plain-text buffer is overwritten by the
>encrypted data -- so if the memory gets swapped out after the encryption is
>complete, Windows will only toss slices of the encrypted data to the hard
>disk.
>
> Suerte,
>
> _Vin
>
>
>-----
> Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin@shore.net>
> 53 Nichols St., Chelsea, MA 02150 USA <617> 884-5548
> -- <@><@> --
>
>
>
>
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:17:25 ADT