[Gllug] Editors

[David Freeman]

 --- home at alexhudson.com wrote: > On Sat, Jul 28, 2001 at 09:25:14PM
+0100, David Freeman wrote:
> > > You could use the -n option to stop vim writing a swapfile, if
> you're
> > > worried about plaintext in the swapfile.
> > 
> > I think I will do so.
> 
> Jesus, rampant paranoia.... let me fuel the flames a little. Unless
> vim
> protects its allocated via mprotect, mlock, et al, then your plain
> pages
> could get written to swap (editors are easy prey, 'specially with
> 2.4's
> aggressive swapping), from where they could be later retrieved.
> You're also
> susceptible to a watcher running in a higher processor ring than
> Linux (a la
> vmWare), so you'd better do more than memfrob() the area. But even if
> you're
> encrypting the area, you need to protect the key/pad/whatever you
> used to do
> it, since someone could just snarf the memory and the secret and they
> have
> it anyway. Which leads you back to the memory protection problem.

Paranoia is a good thing IMHO.
Now I agree with evrything you have said here, you have missed the
obvious one of Van Eck Phreaking! Simply sit in the next room and watch
what I am typing. However this isn't the problem I am trying to solve,
I only want the casual observer not to be able to find any plain text
on the disk so doing a grep wont find anything. Seeing as the VM is
hard to grep I am not worrying about that.

> Of course, the file is also partially available in video RAM, so
> you'll have
> to lock and protect that too. And you'll want to make sure that the
> program
> is statically linked, unless you trust the gcc on that machine. And
> you'll
> want to check for keyboard interrupt catchers too (i.e, the OS),
> because
> otherwise someone could reconstruct your edits from your input. Do
> you trust
> the OS?

Now this is going TOO far. See above.
 
> > Does anyone know if it is possible to recover data from RAM after
> it
> > has been powere down, much like data is recoverable from a HDD
> after it
> > has been deleted?
> 
> Not after a short length of time. But you wouldn't need to - I would
> bet
> there are _much_ easier ways to get at this data you seem to want to
> protect
> so bad :)

True. I was just wondering as I am thinking of installing StegFS.

Thanks

D
 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alex.
> 
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> 
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