It is more than an academic exercise. I'll need to deploy in about six months. I'm still weighing the alternatives.

The simplest case is just set everything important (including Perl) to root owned, read only mode 500. (Ok, maybe perl can be executed by other), kill all non-essentials and then hope noone finds an exploit. It doesn't help with the stolen disk problem, but it is easy and works fine out of the box.

There's also another solution that came up -- using public key crypto you can do a reatime mixmaster type deal where the key is stored locally and requires decryption from a number of cooperative servers -- the key finally arrives only encoded with a local key and can be decoded and used, but never stored. Temporary session keys protect the individual transmissions. It's clunky, but I believe that if done correctly it requires the hacker to have to hack each participating system to steal the key. It also requires some fancy code signing to make sure the program that implements it has integrety.

That sounds like a fun crypto problem, but I'm not sure I want to spend my time that way.

john

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

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