I'm thinking about using ecryptfs, to get encryption on top of zfs in linux. I have a question about security though. I want to make sure that my files are protected if someone gets to my computer after I have unmounted ecryptfs, but before rebooting. I've read about the possibility of dumping keys in memory to swap. But I think that this could be fixed by simply running without swap. I also know that other programs can write open encrypted files to /tmp, but I'm not so worried about that since this can be avoided if you know how the programs accessing your opened files work. What I am worried about is the key somehow being around after unmounting. In an answer on crypto.stackexchange, Mike Halcrow says this: "eCryptfs makes no special effort to prevent key proliferation in memory. You can see how bad that problem is by running eCryptfs in a VM, saving state, and searching for your key material in the memory image." But I'm not sure if this only applies when ecryptfs is mounted. It might seem obvious that the key in ram will be erased after unmounting, but it would be nice to get confirmation on this, and about possible leaks. For example in the truecrypt documentation they explicitly say that: "When a non-system TrueCrypt volume is dismounted, TrueCrypt erases its master keys (stored in RAM)." (I've also asked this question on crypto.stackexchange, with no answer so I thought I should come here.) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe ecryptfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
