Re: Security of data in memory

From: Matthew Cline (matt@nightrealms.com)
Date: 01/17/02 

From: Matthew Cline <matt@nightrealms.com>
To: secprog@securityfocus.com
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 15:44:34 -0800

> On Tue, 2001-12-25 at 13:31, Nicholas Brawn wrote:
> > I have a unix program that reads in an encrypted file, decrypts it and
> > works on it whilst in memory. What security considerations should I be
> > aware of? I'm thinking of things like clearing the decrypted buffer
> > prior to exiting, not storing any of the data in a temporary file, etc.

On UNIX GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org) can, if installed SUID root, locks
memory pages to prevent them from being swapped out to disk. 

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