Thanks to all who have posted, I think you've helped me understand better the issues.

As I mentioned, I'm primarily concerned with industrial espionage and someone trying to steal my proprietary algorithms.

There are a couple of scenerios for this:

1) Josephene hacker finds a here-to-fore unannounced / unpatched remote root exploit on my nearly inpenetratable system. Obviously, if there are no processes running as root and no root cron entries, this is much harder. She must resort to capturing a core image and decompiling.

2) Someone physically breaks into our plant and steals the HD out of the server. An encrypted filesystem and some sort of wipe-if-booting-out-of-my-environment boobytrap are the best options here.

3) The inside job (always the most probable):
3a) a rescue image boot -- see #2 above
3b) our sys-admin is payed off to steal the scripts -- Here the best defense is that he doesn't know the root password. That is probably workable in this case.

So the big questions remain where/how to store the key for the encrypted filesystem and how to implement a wipe-if-booting-out-of-my-environment boobytrap. Hmmmm...

john

In reply to My conclusions by jhanna
in thread "safe" perl cron environment? by jhanna

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