On Oct 24, 2005, at 12:43 PM, Marvin Lyndon wrote:
suppose you just use a chunk of RAM as a swap device [http://
kerneltrap.org/node/3660]
Surely you are joking... How can using RAM for a SWAP device possibly
make sense?
Rather, encrypt the swap device on disk, too.
Similarly, /tmp is mounted as a ramfs.
Our Solaris installations used to do this by default, and were prone
to running out of RAM. Some programs write *large* files into /tmp
for short periods of time...
Given such a setup, is there any reason to fear data leakage to
sectors outside the encrypted partition?
/var/run
/var/tmp
There may well be other places... check the Linux Filesystem
Hierarchy Standard. Also check to see if your installation follows
it. Then remove all application programs, as these may write data to
various places...
Honestly, I found it much more robust to simply encrypt the whole
disk and have done with it. This worked well enough on a Linux
laptop, I booted from a USB flash drive. (Now I use a Mac OS X laptop
which does not yet support whole-disk encryption, so I make do as
best I can... but on Linux there are better options!)
~ boyd
-
Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/
