Re: the cold-boot attack - a paper tiger?

--- Jari Ruusu <[email protected]>
wrote:
> 
> 1) gpg and losetup communicate using pipes. losetup
> sends passphrase to gpg
>    using a pipe. gpg sends decrypted key material to
> losetup using a pipe.
>    Last time I looked at mainline pipe code
> implementation, it did not
>    sanitize kernel RAM buffers that were used to
> temporarily hold pipe data.
>    For me personally this has not been a problem
> because I run kernels that
>    sanitize pipe buffers on last close of a pipe.
> 
> 2) When hashing key material, sha512.c functions
> sha256_transform() and
>    sha512_transform() do not explicitly sanitize
> stack variables that may
>    contain data derived from last (65th) IV key
> material. In practice,
>    sensitive stack parts get overwritten by later
> stack usage of
>    losetup/mount programs.
> 
> Other parts of losetup (and mount) always properly
> sanitize key material,
> excluding 'kill -9' type events.
> 

Catching up on Jari's post - apologies, yahoo mail is
not so good for reading this list since it
unpredictably treats some posts as spam and dumps them
in the bulk folder.

Questions:

1. Which kernels sanitize pipe buffers in the way Jari
is saying?

2. I was under the impression SIGKILL couldn't be
trapped or ignored in C.  How then does loop-aes catch
a kill -9 and sanitize keys in memory before exiting?






      

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