Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro(a)gnome.org> wrote:
Oh, GNOME keyring still works mostly fine, it just fails to lock the
memory to prevent it from being paged to disk. It only really matters
if you're running some ultra-secure military/government stuff, but it's
not how it was designed to work.
Although I can't find a source now, I seem to recall that GnuPG recently
stopped using special memory-locking widgets for its passphrase entry
dialog. One of the reasons mentioned was that mlock doesn't add much
security because hibernation will write even locked memory to the disk.
I think encrypting the swap partition (and the rest of the disk) is a
better way of protecting secrets. Ultra-secure military stuff should
probably just have enough RAM and no swap partition.
mlock seems better suited for time-critical algorithms, like preventing
skips in audio like Thomas mentioned. The limit should be chosen with
that kind of usage in mind.
Björn Persson