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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:18:41 ADT
Peter Gutmann (pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz)
Fri, 19 Jun 1998 09:56:05 (NZST)
>As this paper highlights the importance - among other things - of keeping the
>secret state of a PRNG unknown to an attacker, I find the question naturally
>arises as to how security might be provided for such a value - or indeed any
>sensitive data like keys etc - in in a modern Windows PC.
I looked at this in my 1998 Usenix Security Symposium paper (referenced in
Bruce's paper) which is available via the Usenix archive at
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sec98/ or from
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/random.pdf. The paper goes into
various techniques for ensuring things don't get paged out or leaked, and also
examines the effectiveness of various strategies, including why some things
which should work (eg VirtualLock, if you believe the docs) don't.
Jim Adler <jadler@soundcode.com> added:
>To that end, we are currently developing a set of drivers for Win95 and WinNT
>that will allocate non-swappable memory. The drivers will be released into
>the public-domain in the hope of putting this issue to rest, on Windows at
>least.
I've been looking at this too (with the same goal in mind), but if you're
already doing it I'll leave it up to you. In case anyone's interested, the
idea was to create a very simple driver which would just allocate and free a
given number of locked 4K pages mapped into the callers address space
(suballocation is done by the user, it's much easier to let the caller handle
it than to build a full memory allocator inside a kernel driver).
Peter.
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:18:41 ADT