POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Hyperthreading : Re: Hyperthreading Server Time
29 Jul 2024 10:28:22 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Hyperthreading  
From: Orchid Win7 v1
Date: 6 Jul 2012 13:27:05
Message: <4ff71fe9$1@news.povray.org>
>>> How can the PGP task even be swapped in if it's swapped out and needs to
>>> be swapped back in in order to decrypt itself from the swap file? >_<
>>
>> Either the swap file is unencrypted, or PGP is marked non-swappable.
>> (Yes, you can do that.)
>
> Not encrypting the swap file could lead to very interesting data
> leakage,

Yeah. But it's possible to have the OS zero the page file at shutdown. 
(This doesn't save you in case of a power failure, mind you.)

Also, when I last read the PGP manual, it claims to demand that the OS 
not swap out any security data that PGP itself is managing, e.g. 
encryption keys. (It also makes the keys around to different physical 
memory pages, and overwrites the old place with random data, to prevent 
somebody yanking the RAM chips out and deep-freezing them to try to 
recover the data once the power is gone. Really paranoid stuff like that...)

> so I'm going to go with (B) the PGP process is not swappable.

Yeah, I would imagine that's the case.

> I'm sure that most disk encryption companies have figured this one
> out... probably after an "oops!" in beta testing.

More like alpha testing, I should think. ;-)


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