If you are afraid that the decryption key could be read from memory, switch to a algorithm which encrypts the key.

I know this is not Perl any more but can I ask you if you have handy some pointers for the above? Yes there is XOR or some other obfuscation but the parameters (e.g. XOR operand) must be saved somewhere too... and so on. Just to clarify: I do not need a digest/hash because the actual password must be decoded in order to pass it on to DB for connecting.

Here is a scenario: program needs to connect to DB (many times, not just once). So the first time it runs, it asks the user to supply the password (or even user supplies it via commandline - we know the risk of that). Said program stores password in memory for whenever connecting to DB. Someone (root) does a memory dump of the running process and the password is in there (somewhere). If the password was encrypted somehow then the key will be in the memory dump too (unless it is read from a file etc. but that could prove risky AND expensive). So, the program does not contain the password but when it is run, it must store the password in program memory. How to encrypt that? What do people do in such cases?

bw, bliako (newbie encrypter)

In reply to Re^6: use of already eval()ed module (from string) by bliako
in thread use of already eval()ed module (from string) by bliako

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