[Haskell-cafe] Re: A suggestion for the next high profile Haskell project

[Magnus Therning]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 20:11:05 -0500, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
>
>On Dec 18, 2006, at 18:26 , ls-haskell-developer-2006 at m-e-leypold.de wrote:
>
>>
>>Tomasz Zielonka <tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>>On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 11:57:59PM +0100, 
>>>ls-haskell-developer-2006 at m-e-leypold.de wrote:
>>>>... but I wonder: GPG, AFAIK undertakes some special measures to
>>>>ensure that neither clear text nor private keys are paged out to the
>>>>disk (since it might be recovered from there by "the enemy"). How
>>>>would you lock data in memory in Haskell? Would that be possible?
>>>>
>>>>It seems to me that all participants in this thread have missed this
>>>>point so far.
>>>
>>>You could just mlock() everything allocated by the RTS...
>>
>>Brute force. :-) Certainly the most simple way to do it. But is that
>>option already here (say in ghc), or would one have to patch the
>>runtime for that?
>
>Note also that this requires setuid root (yes, in gpg as well) --- so
>you are trading one known security issue for an unknown number of
>others.

Very true.  In the end it comes down to what threats one wants to
address and personally I don't think that the threat that mlock()
addresses rates very highly.  Even when taking into account the
seemingly rampant misplacing of laptops of late.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                             (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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