On Saturday 05 January 2002 22:28, you wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Jan 2002, Matthew Sackman wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 05, 2002 at 10:59:23AM +0000, Jon Masters wrote:
> > > [OT]
> > >
> > > I'm looking at using encrypted swap on a new box soon, anyone here
> > > doing this? Usually I have to say I don't bother encrypting swap and
> > > rely on sensitive stuff being mlock()ed :-)
> >
> > Um, quite what would be the point of this? Do you encrypt the contents of
> > your RAM?
>
> Huh? If someone nicks a machine using encrypted swap then it's harder for
> them to recover any useful data from it. Said machine is to be used for
> offsite secure backups which are already encrypted using various strong
> crypto and stored on ext3 on LV groups on RAID 5 arrays.
Hang on a minute surely in this circumstance these boxes in the 'non-trusted'
environment should only have your public keys on them, and data encrypted
using keys not present on these machines. If they have more than that, then
you've made an error (any 'session' keys stored should be protected by the
main secure machine's private key).
Data should be encrypted before it ever arrives there, so I don't see what
you're gaining, by encrypting swap at all. The machines should only see
'public information' and nothing else.
Therefore this seems like a bridge too far. Possibly it will even be counter
productive by making you complacent.
Rob
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