On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 5:16 PM, Pekka Enberg <penberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 5:56 PM, Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@xxxxxxxx> wrote: >> I fear that the only portable (across compiler versions) and safe >> solution is to invoke an assembly-coded dummy function with prototype >> >> void use(void *p); >> >> and rewrite the code above as >> >> { >> u32 temp[...]; >> ... >> memset(temp, 0, sizeof temp); >> use(temp); >> } >> >> This forces the compiler to consider the buffer live after the >> memset, so the memset cannot be eliminated. > > So is there some "do not optimize" GCC magic that we could use for a > memzero_secret() helper function? > > Pekka > *(volatile char *)p = *(volatile char *)p; appears to work when called after the memset: --- inline void ensure_memset(void* p) { *(volatile char *)p = *(volatile char *)p; } void foo() { char password[] = "secret"; password[0]='S'; printf ("Don't show again: %s\n", password); memset(password, 0, sizeof(password)); ensure_memset(password); } int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { foo(); int i; char foo3[] = ""; char* bar = &foo3[0]; for (i = -50; i < 50; i++) printf ("%c.", bar[i]); printf("\n"); return 0; } -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-crypto" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html