On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 15:53:01 CEST, Sven Eschenberg wrote: > On Fri, June 26, 2015 15:19, Arno Wagner wrote: [...] > > - I have no idea whether locked memory can end up in a > > core-dump, but usually these are disabled anyways. > > There certainly is a debug option to get coredumps including locked pages, > I presume. I would expect so as well. But debugging is not a concern IMO, unless it is too easy to leace on accidentally. > > - In-kernel keys are protected against leaking to disk. > > Again, I presume, since I did not check the kernel's source, that the > relevant kernel pages are marked as unswappable. I guess when you dump the > kernel for debugging you'll get the locked pages aswell - Doesn't make to > much sense if all locked pages are missing from the dump. > > > > > The thing is, system encryption is not easy to do and conceptually > > does not help a lot. If it was necessary to prevent having > > passphrases/keys to disk, that would be a major security flaw > > in the handling of said passphrases/keys and it would affect > > other things as well, like GnuPG, OpenSSL, etc. and so I hope > > somebody would have complained by now if that was a real issue. > > It is quite difficult to i.e. encrypt /etc (which might include > passphrases for services or something) by it's own, so doing a system > encryption is quite tempting. Otherwhise you'll have to relocate specific > files from /etc to other places and maintain a pile of config changes, > which can be quite an effort aswell. Well, yes. It is a trade-off that depends on the specific situation and distribution. Personally, I avoid putting credentials into /etc, but I do have some in my home, mostly ssh-keys allowing passwordless logins. I do realize this will not always be possible. Gr"usse, Arno -- Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., Email: arno@xxxxxxxxxxx GnuPG: ID: CB5D9718 FP: 12D6 C03B 1B30 33BB 13CF B774 E35C 5FA1 CB5D 9718 ---- A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers. -- Plato If it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." -- Bruce Schneier _______________________________________________ dm-crypt mailing list dm-crypt@xxxxxxxx http://www.saout.de/mailman/listinfo/dm-crypt
