On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 5:33 PM, roel kluin <roel.kluin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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: Or similar to suggested here: https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/cplusplus/MSC06-CPP.+Be+aware+of+compiler+optimization+when+dealing+with+sensitive+data This memzero_secret() appears to work: void *memzero_secret(void *v, size_t n) { volatile unsigned char *p = v; while (n--) *p++ = 0; return v; } --- #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <stdlib.h> void *memzero_secret(void *v, size_t n) { volatile unsigned char *p = v; while (n--) *p++ = 0; return v; } void foo() { char password[] = "secret"; password[0]='S'; printf ("Don't show again: %s\n", password); memzero_secret(password, sizeof(password)); //memset(password, 0, sizeof(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