Greetings, monks!

I come to you with some security related questions. I'm coding a daemon that needs to periodically access encrypted data and perform operations on it. At the same time, I need to prevent access from the data in case someone manages to log into the machine. I was figuring doing something likes this:

Upon launch, the daemon asks for the decryption password, which is assigns to a variable and retains all through its run-time. It can then use the password to access the encrypted data, get the information it needs and perform operations.

My first question is: is it possible for someone with terminal access to the system (it is a Linux system) to access the values of variables within a perl script from the outside? Perhaps if they did a memory dump? "hexdump -c"?

My second question is: How about the input stream for a script? I was planning to enter the password simply via <STDIN>. Can someone read things from STDIN from before they accessed the stream?

I apologize in advance. These questions are probably really stupid and show my ignorance of even the simplest things about Perl and Linux. Unfortunately, I had no formal schooling in this kind of stuff so my ignorance is vast. I would appreciate any pointers, because I don't know where to even start looking.

In reply to Reading streams, perl variables when script is running by xtpu

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