Scott G. Miller wrote on 4/13/01 7:03 am: <>
>We can't make this >assurance in Java. I know. The suggestion (only store the value of the key when it's needed, then immediately garbage collect it) was to reduce the chance of it hitting swap space. I'm quite aware that we the chance of it being on swap will never hit 0 (unless the user shuts off swap entirely), but we can at least come close. When the program needs the key again, it can read it back from the file (which the paranoid will have put on a RAM disk). Note that the paranoid people will also make a script which, once every day (ajust time for your level of paranoia) will copy the encryption key to a second RAM disk, remounting this second disk to the mount point of the first one, then wiping the first one. It is possible (though very difficult) for a determend opponent to recover data that is on RAM, and their job is made much easier if a piece of data is sitting on the same address in RAM for a long time. This rotation script helps prevent this. Timm Murray ----------- Theory is when you know how it works, but fails. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why. Here, Theory and Practice come together. Nothing works, and nobody knows why. _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl at freenetproject.org http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devl >From - Sun Apr 15 14:51:11 2001
