> No, people can *look* at *any data that has /ever/ been on any magnetic
> media* with a scanning electron microscope. It is extremely difficult
> if not impossible to remove the previous data.  The easiest way to
> remove the previous data is to melt down your hard drive's platter
> with thermite.

Use of an electron microscope is expensive. More expensive than the
data would be. What data would be stored on a node which could justify
such a cost? Remember - if you make it economically impractical to attack
a node this way, THE MAN will have a hard time justifying the cost to
his superiors.

> microscope, THE MAN has to rip open your RAM chips in a clean room and
> do a very thorough sodium diffusion analysis on the RAM chips.  It
> would probably be much easier to grab the data from the swap than to
> do sodium diffusion analysis on RAM chips.

Not cheap.

> Wouldn't someone need to get at least an account on your box under
> their control, if not root to do this?  I assume that the people who

Read BugTraq some time. You'll notice a recurring theme - you often don't
need an account, you only need to exploit the daemon(s) on the server to
get them to perform a security-compromising function. All daemons bound
to ports < 1024 require root access at some point. Some programmers forget
that you need to change the effective UID *AND* GID to drop those privs...

> Also, doesn't shared memory have permissions, which makes it
> impossible for a user other than root to access another user's shared

Yeah.. but those can be subverted by environmental variables or (as always)
a kernel patch. How can freenet guarantee a trusted environment when it
is runnning in an unpriveledged capacity? How can it detect tampering with
the kernel? It can't.. it is the job of the user to ensure a high trust
level
on their system, not freenet's. Simply put, it is an impossible design
consideration.

> root) (which should not happen if people the people who implemented
> shared memory had any sanity).

As has been demonstrated previously, programmers are not well known
for their sanity. Afterall, we have Windows...

*grinning, ducking, and running*

~ Signal 11




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