Marco van Eck <marco.van...@gmail.com> writes: > Indeed having unencrypted password lying (.pgpass or PGPASSWORD or -W) > around is making my auditors unhappy, and forcing me to enter the password > over and over again. With a simple test it seems the password entered by > the user also stays in memory, since it is able to reset a broken > connection. Finding the password in memory is not trivial, but prevention > is always preferred.
> It might be an idea to wipe the password after the login, and decrypt/read > it again if it needs to reconnect. Would this make the solution more > secure? I had a quick look at the code and the patch would stay compact. > Please let me know of doing this would make sense. We're basically not going to accept any added complication that's designed to prevent memory-inspection attacks, because in general that's a waste of effort. All you're doing is (slightly) reducing the attack window. regards, tom lane