Hi,

I know about using md5 for obtaining a hash for a password and such but that isn't what I'm after.

What I'm trying to figure out without the caffeine roaring through my bloodstream, is how to hide a password in this circumstance:
I have a script that I enter my login/password once but will contact an arbitrary number of other machines via ssh/telnet/rlogin/etc. The problem is that if I force perl to core dump (i.e. kill -4), I can scan the core dump for my login & password because it was in memory.
Remember that I want to enter the login/password only once, hide the password (encryption of some sort) and keep the window where the password is in cleartext in memory to a minimum amount of time (used for the remote connection login).

So far, I haven't found any way to do this without significant holes:

  1. encrypting a hash or other memory region requires the key to be stored which could be retrieved to unencypt the password in the core file.
  2. Storing the password in a file (encrypted or not) poses a similar risk.
  3. Storing the password in memory using a 1 way hash requires the user to reenter the password

Obviously, this is a worst case scenerio with no easy answers that I can determine.

Jason L. Froebe

Team Sybase member

No one has seen what you have seen, and until that happens, we're all going to think that you're nuts. - Jack O'Neil, Stargate SG-1

In reply to hiding passwords by jfroebe

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