Hi, I was thinking the other day, about things like what happens when you use Perl to do things like GPG encryptions? Can I be sure that Perl will not leave traces of password keys in memory? Then this security focus article appeared today, and sort of got me to post this.

My immediate first idea was this: can I force a Perl script to run in a ramdisk (on linux), which can then be wiped with zeros(or 1's) after execution? This just brings up a bigger question.... can you somehow control where in ram a program is executed, or at least track all of the memory segments, and wipe them when the program is done running?

If a program is stored in a ramdisk, will it execute in that ramdisk, or may it be moved to some other ram area for execution?

Anyways, what other ideas are there to address this problem? Execute on removable usb keys, etc?


I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum

In reply to Can Perl encryption scripts be run with ram wipe by zentara

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.