On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 16:15 -0500, Na Li wrote: > On 27 Oct 2005, Duncan Temple Lang wrote: > > > Yes, it is of interest and was sitting on my todo list at > > some time. If you want to go ahead and provide code to do it, > > that would be terrific. There are other areas where encryption > > would be good to have, so a general mechanism would be nice. > > > > D. > > > > Na Li wrote: > > > Hi, I wonder if there is interest/intention to allow for encrypted .RData > > > files? One can certainly do that outside R manually but that will leave a > > > decrypted RData file somewhere which one has to remember to delete. > > > > > I was hoping someone has already done it. ;-( > > One possibility is to implement an interface package to gpgme library which > itself is an interface to GnuPG. > > But I'm not sure how the input of passphrase can be handled without using > clear text. > > Michael
Seems to me that a better option would be to encrypt the full partition such that (unless you write the files to a non-encrypted partition) these issues are transparent. This would include the use of save(), save.image() and write() type functions to save what was an encrypted dataset/object to a unencrypted file. Of course, you would also have to encrypt the swap and tmp partitions (as appropriate) for similar reasons. On Linuxen/Unixen, full encryption of partitions is available via loopback devices and other mechanisms and some distros have this available as a built-in option. I believe that the FC folks finally have this on their list of functional additions for FC5. Windows of course can do something similar. The other consideration here, is that if R Core builds in some form of encryption, there is the potential for import/export restrictions on such technology since R is available via international CRAN mirrors. It may be best to provide for a plug-in "encryption black box" of sorts, so that folks can use a particular encryption schema that meets various legal/regulatory requirements. Of course, simply encrypting the file or even a complete partition has to be considered within a larger security strategy (ie. network security, physical access control, etc.) that meets a particular functional requirement (such as HIPAA here in the U.S.) HTH, Marc Schwartz ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html