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Passwords Can Sit on Hard Disks for Years
CygnusXII writes ""As people spend more time on the web and hackers become more sophisticated, the dangers of storing personal information on computers are growing by the day, security experts say. There are some obvious safeguards, such as never allowing your computer to store your passwords. But even that is no guarantee of security." "
Run for the hills! There's no guarantee of security! Everyone stop using your computers right now!
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I've got to stop using c:\windows as my password!
It looks like some reporter just discovered the page file. :)
The project was written in C++. We started out using a custom string class that performed its own memory management (with zeroing the buffer on deallocation), but then promptly ran into problems with the STL. We wound up writing a memory allocator that also cleans up after itself. Those two solutions took care of the vast majority of the data leakage "problem" -- the only thing left was reinitializing stack variables within functions.
The same customer actually requested this first. The problems associated with it were were terrible, especially in a multithreaded application. Plus, performance basically sucked. Wiping the data afterwards seemed to have the same end result, the performance was still good, and the customer was happy.BTW, the memory allocator and string class both made their way into the company's downloadable core library (MIT license).
Computers not secure? What a relief all my passwords are on stickies stuck to my monitor. I'm set!
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
What about encrypting swap space? This will not a) solve the problem completely, and b) may waste CPU cycles, but should be within easy reach of OS implementors. If your system swaps so often that that becomes a problem, you're in trouble anyway...
-- Gideon
My favorite MacGyver episodes were the ones where he used fingerprinting dust to read the numbers on a keypad. Of course, anyone using the keypad for a password is only going to press the keys involved in the password.
The most dangerous thing to security is people. Why go routing around on a hard drive when you can just ask someone what the password is, and they'll probably tell you anyways?
stuff |
Let's just do a brain scan of everyone. I mean, you can forge fingerprints, voice prints, etc, but you can't beat a mind probe!
talk about hacker sophistication...
This is not my opinion. Actually, it's not even an opinion. And I'm nowhere to be seen near it
It's amazing how easy it is to find people's password files shared on P2P apps like DirectConnect, Gnutella, etc. There's everything - Total Commander (FTP), WS FTP, mail clients, you just have to search for the proper file name.
I'd really like to sell you my old computer since this is a yard sale and all, but I see that you're wearing a mask, carrying a saber, and have a black hat on that says "l33t h4x0r!" I can't help but think that you might somehow be up to some nefarious shenanigans!
I've still got a three year old password on a postit note on the side of my monitor. It just goes to show you that passwords can sit anywhere.
The real question is, if a password's that old, what use SHOULD it still have? Hopefully, people adopt policies where they update passwords every month, or few months, especially if it's dealing with anything financial/uber personal (doctor's records.. etc).
Get real, stop trying to scare us with your security warnings; just educate people to change their passwords.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Passwords have been on hard drives for many many years. No matter if you are using M$ operating system or a linux there are passwords on the machine. If people don't know how to protect their computers than many they should just give their ATM card password to the public domain.
Another story about how insecure your passwords are. Is it possible that writers like to oversensationalize things and make us afraid?
They wouldn't really do that would they?
Disclaimer: I didn't RTFA because I know it will be dumb!
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
These troll polls are the work of:
http://slashdot.org/~LBArrettAnderson
with that, all my passwords are automatically filled in by Gator.....
I will only use sticky notes on my monitor to store my passwords from now on.
presmike
... and nobody's figured it out yet. I actually use several passwords, depending on the level of security. The "lowest" password, "password", is used for signing up to things like mailing lists, etc where there's little chance of me returning. The mid-level password, a pair of words with numbers in them, is used for mid-level security, such as my email, etc. The highest level password, a random collection of numbers, letters, and symbols, is used for the most secure information, such as my bank account, slashdot login and my pr0n encryption key.
Now if I could only remember the combination to my safe.....
Just my 46fctfj6&*23's worth....
-Rick the WizKid
(oooops...)
When you're not swapping and you've got some spare cycles that aren't being used, just pass over the empty swap pages with zeros... Clean 'em up.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Ah, funny this story was posted--I just had to address this issue the other day. I run Mac OS X and I happened to be doing a fresh install, moving all my data over from an old HD. Before this, I had always stored my slew of account info in a text file in an obscure and unlabeled file (I know, I know--very careless of me--that's way I was ready to change my ways!).
Mac OS X's built-in "Keychain" services/util isn't streamlined for repeated user use, not to mention it doesn't have several auxiliary/free-form fields (that are also fully encrypted with the password field). After some research and trying a few of the freeware and shareware apps out there, I came across Pastor, a freeware, super-lightweight and user-friendly app that basically lets you maintain a catalog of username, pass, and about 6 auxiliary fields, stored in an encrypted file (when you go to open a file, it prompts you for the password and decodes it on the fly). If for some reason you don't dig this particular app, there's a couple others like it as well with increasingly levels of features (I happen to prefer lightweight).
So I went w/ this model and it's had great payoffs--when I need a particular login, I click on an alias to my main password (Pastor) file, enter the file's password to decrypt it, look for what I need (it alphabetizes), and I'm all set--meanwhile, there's absolutely no risk of security--I love it.
G-Force music visualization
I'm pretty sure Linux can do this. Proof - GPG's secmem-warning. I don't get it on Woody. Solaris is different. I think it needs root.
There's no way to be 100% secure with passwords and the likes, but there are some things everyone should do. 1.) don't have the same password for everything! The website admins to every site you use a password for have access to it (and no one can trust a slashdot editor!). 2.) change your password often. The more often the better. This won't always work since most people, when they get a password, will do their damage immediately... but you never know. Another advantage here is OLD websites that you visitted a long time ago may change and new administrators will have access to your password.
pretty redundant stuff, but good advice that most people are too lazy to follow.
This is as old as de first computer with a password.
The security of youre personal information (credit card number, password etc...) lies with the companies storing them.
We all know that hackers aquire passwords by hacking company's data bases. Until company's use stingent privacy and security procedures and implementnations the world wide web remain's a wild west show.
Greetings,
Lord Flashheart.
Just put your swap on another partition and zero it every so often (any way to do this automatically during shutdown, after VM is suspended?) - that takes care of your passwords in memory. As for programs that store them on disk, they better be encrypted, ala Apple's Keychain.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Well with access to your bank acocunt, slashdot and pr0n collection, it doesn't sound like you would need whatever was in the safe anyways :)
Hmmm.
Store all your passwords on a burned CD, that way they'll have a shelf-life of 3-5 years tops.
and I did RTFA, and realize they're talking about the swap file... ...but I have 1.5GB of RAM, and I have a 20MB swap file that's overwritten each time I reboot my PC.
:)
Most Windows systems use the default setting for virtual memory, which is "windows managed" -- which means it's overwritten each time the system is rebooted. What's the big deal?
Has anyone here actually hex edited a swap file before? How is the data actually stored? For the reasons mentioned in the article, I imagine it would at least... not store data transmitted via SSL in plain text (why the heck would form data stick around in RAM anyway?)
Sounds like a neat project for after work today.
[an error occured while processing this directive]
And everyone laughed at me when I put 2GB of RAM in my computer, allocated 1GB as a RAM disk, and pulled the harddrive out. None of those security issues here!
One thing that worries me is sending machines away to get repaired.
I have a Sony Vaio laptop which I had to send to be repaired. I phoned the support number to tell them I was going to take the hard disc out before sending it. They said that if I did I would be charged for a new hard disc (at a hugely inflated price) and they wouldn't repair it without one.
I once sent a PC for repair and the teenage dork who repaired it actually said I had some great games on my machine and that he had played them. In another case in the UK, some padeophile was caught (was it Garry Glitter?) when he sent his PC in for repair. Now, I'm all for catching kiddie fiddlers, but that is not the way to do it.
I don't want the repair staff looking through the stuff on my hard disc. There should be a standard industry guarantee that this won't happen, or a privacy law about it or something.
When I read the headline, I was alarmed. But
and keep your goatsex links and pictures confidential.
then I read the article, and all my worries went away.
I encrypt my swap partition, and that fixes the problem.
It's not hard, and since it's swap (i.e., data
you don't need for very long), you don't even need
to remember a password (your computer uses a random
one every time is sets up the swap). Really, it's
pretty easy -- see the HOWTO at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Disk-Encryption-HOWTO/
----- Why sig when you can sign? PGP key id 7675D05E
You can prevent writing pages to swap using mlock(2). Works on most *NIXes. You do have to be root though. Perhaps an idea for Linux: allow non-root users to lock just one page for passwords ?
Why go to the trouble?
We all know that 70% of people will give you their passwords for chocolate.
And I'm fairly sure that the other 30% will give it to you for sex. And then probably change it, but, you can take that chance.
no. they are the work of
PollTroll
I'm over my comment limit, thank you very much.
I've always found it stupid that you can log on to a windows domain without being connected to the network assuming you have sucessfully logged onto the domain with that machine.
I'm assuming that a windows machine keeps a copy of every username and a passord hash (NTLM?) used to log in to any domain locally somewhere on the harddrive.
That is scary news really especially in hotdesk/shared desktop environments.
Isn't there something along the lines of "Client side security is no security at all" in Microsofts security axioms. Can't even follow their own standards.
----
Which is directly proportional to the growth of access and availability to PCs worldwide, and the danger is not growing, stolen passwords are stolen passwords, today or 5 years ago. And the "hacks" they speak of have been around
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I keep my passwords on my computer, but in an encrypted database. I don't know of any safer way to manage my passwords and user accounts for countless web sites and pieces of software.
The only potential downsides to this threat are two-fold. One, a hacker could install a keylogger on my machine. I find that unlikely as I keep my anti-virus software up to date and I don't receive any spam or virus emails since they are all filtered. It is possible that one could install via a worm, but unlikely that it would go undetected for long.
Second, someone could break the encryption used on the database. I find that doubtful since it's pretty high-level encryption and the amount of effort to crack it would not be trivial.
The primary issue I see above is whether the value of the information exceeds the potential effort in obtaining it. I really doubt anyone would ever want my personal information thus I see the value of my information as being far lower than the difficulty needed to obtain it.
But if you think your personal details disappear as soon as you hit the Return key, think again: they can sit on the computer's hard disk for years waiting for a hacker to rip them off.
So, then, we're operating on the assumption that I've ever had a hard drive for more than a year...
And if I did, i didn't format it at least 3 times/year.
SO THERE!
I have no swap partition.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
With the 1 year warranty on a lot of drives now, no they can't, because the drives don't last that long.
The comment that 'operating systems such as windows and linux' have no way to stop RAM getting paged to disk is just wrong. The mlock(2) call does exactly that - the problem is people not using it. I would guess win32 has a similar API call.
You'd be amazed what you can find on Kazaa when you search for documents with password or resume or account as the keyword. People don't realize that you don't need to be a hacker to break into your machine - just someone with access to the folder you share on and P2P network...which, if it happens to be your My Documents folder....look out.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
...until I physically destroy it! (Of course, my sledgehammer method may not stop the FBI from getting the data back, but it'll stop most hackers!
Best Buy can have you arrested
huh? I did make the IMPoll poll service and i post polls to slashdot somewhat often but the poll trolls are not my work. (and don't say "oh look at the coincidence that they are both posting on slashdot at the same time. it is just a coincidence).
Practice safe-sex security measures on your box and you'll not need to worry about swap files, browser caches, and even that set of nude photos you and your wife took of each other last evening after a bottle of champagne ;-)
Pointing out the things someone can get on your machine once they've hacked you isn't really very useful. It's your machine and you're bound to keep things on it you'd prefer not be seen by strangers. Pointing out how not to get hacked is.
From the article:
Perhaps the ultimate solution would be to encrypt data as it is entered, before it is saved into RAM, and arrange for programs that use it to decrypt it first.
Huh? Does this make any sense to anybody? After all, once you've decrypted the text, you probably have it in RAM anyways, so you still have to deal with it in the same way.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
...on a site asking for registration. Just use bugmenot.com (the Firefox extension is useful). That way, you can limit what your password is used for (if you only use one password) and avoid having to memorize 50 different passwords (if, for security reasons, you use different passwords at different sites).
OpenBSD encrypts the swap space by default, specifically to avoid these problems. I would hazard a guess somebody has hacked Linux to do the same, but I haven't seen it.
Of course, if you have so much RAM that you never swap, this is less of an issue.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if an attacker has the permissions to trawl through the swap, then couldn't they just insert a keylogger, instead? That seems to be considerably simpler, to me.
I suppose there's an argument about someone getting the passwords off old machines that have been thrown out. But even then, surely any respectable business will use some software to scrub out all the last traces of sensitive data on any hard drives they're dumping.
An encrypted hard drive wouldn't protect against a key logger. It would protect sensitive data against physical theft, I suppose. But I wouldn't call that "hacking".
Forget using dd to wipe a drive. Me and a friend prefer the usage of small arms fire to totally shatter the platter.
.223 or a 7.62x39mm tearing through a crappy Maxtor.
Nothing like a
Panther, Mac OS 10.3, has a nifty tool that encrypts your user directory on a hard drive every time you log out; then it decrypts it when you login. Although I am not paranoid, I will use it in case my laptop has to go for repairs because I simply do not trust technicians.
I think it is because each time the swap file is allocated, it doesn't necessarily use the same inodes and blocks on the hard drive. Therefore, your hard drive has reminants of old swap files all over it.
Windows could just be set to not use a swap file at all. I'm not sure how far that would go towards solving the problem. Perhaps Garfinkel's USENIX paper will explain.
2) To delete things properly, turn off paging and disk caching, reboot, then run something like Mutilate to fill all the unused disk space with rubbish. Remember to turn paging and caching back on afterwards or performance will be slooooow.
3) If you're disposing of a PC and you want to sell it with the HDD, it's usually easiest to reformat the HDD in another PC (as a slave) then run a file wiper as above.
4) Running a good file wiper once is perfectly adequate. Physical data recovery techniques using misaligned drive heads to pick up "ghost" images may or may not exist (hence the occasional recommendation to wipe 9 times) but the cost of doing so is so high that it would have to be a matter of national security. Commercial data recovery/forensic services do NOT use physical recovery techniques, they just go for deleted files and slack space.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Some basic tips that not enough people know, in no particular order:
1. Make sure you have a firewall configured to allow incoming connections from only ports you need open. You might be able to do just fine with no incoming connections allowed at all.
2. Have an updated virus checker.. Norton or Mcafee. By updated, I mean having it auto-update for you. Have it check every file accessed on media accessed by the computer, and email. At the very least, all the incoming media and email should be scanned on the fly, but outgoing is a good idea too.
3. Use Spybot or Ad Aware at least once a month to scan for spyware. Also keep these updated. I forget if they auto-update, but just be sure it checks for updates before you run them.
4. Only use credit cards that keep you free of liability for any fraud.
5. Buy a separate unnetworked little organizer with a keyboard to store hints to remember your passwords. Don't store the actual password.
6. Cancel credit cards you don't use.
7. Photocopy the backs and fronts of all the credit/debit cards you use and whatever else you keep in your wallet. Write in the customer service phone numbers if they're not clear.
8. Have Windows auto-update and auto-install all critical patches, or keep your Linux distro updated.
9. Don't open email attachments that you have no reason to trust, and certainly not until you have antivirus software checking incoming emails.
I use a handy javascript I wrote (and ported to PHP, Perl, JSP, and ColdFusion) to generate pronounceable passwords for my work computer. They make me change it every month and I'm not allowed to use the same one for twelve months. This keeps me out of a rotation, and it's really easy to remember because it's pronouncable.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
And sometimes, they just sit on the front page of Slashdot.
the most secure password ever, it is joshua, well maybe not anymore.
People sign up for web services using a throwaway webmail/domain name. Typically these web services allow the user to recover a forgotten password by entering their E-mail address. The only problem is, they lose interest in the web service and forget about their webmail account/domain name. After some time, the webmail account/domain name will be placed back in the public domain, ready for anyone else to stake a claim.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
nytimes.com
name:b_______
pwd:m_______9___
hsx.com
name:h____
pwd:g___g____2___
Passwords are written on little yellow sticky paper, then they sit on the side of the monitor.
["Operating systems such as Windows and Linux have no facility for stopping data being written to the hard drive."]
In fact.. such operating systems are DESIGNED to write to the hard disk..
(like someone said above.. someone just discovered the swap/page file)
I think the author needed to be alittle more articulate with the wording.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Passwords lying around in swap files eh?
Why is the hacker being allowed to see the swap file again? Seems your system has bigger risks.
Thanks
http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/
Wouldn't this be a good reason for the OS to permit programs to pin pages in RAM? The only reason I can think of not to permit that would be that a hostile program could DOS a system by pinning lots of memory in RAM; if the OS strictly limits the amount of memory that a program can lock in RAM, that would fix that.
I think that gpg runs setuid just so that it can lock its memory in RAM; why don't Linux and Windows offer this feature to non-privileged programs?
Here's the windows equivalent: KeePass
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I've found that the best way to record my passwords and not have to worry about some nefarious h4x0r types stealing it is to get it reverse tattooed on my ass.
The obvious advantage is they're not visible to the wandering eye, and if I ever forget one, a quick glimpse in the mirror is all I need to refresh my memory. Also, it's not like anyone's going to be trying to steal my ass anytime soon.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
How about setting it up so that all that kinds of cache would be stored on something like a key fob? Like the already widely available USB memory plugs. As long as you restrict the storing of cached passwords, cookies etc to such a device, you could at least remove it easily.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
That a hacker will necromance your password off the hard drive, or that you'll get a keylogging spyware installation? To avoid the first you need to never store your password, to avoid the second you need to always store it. Sure, we could all go to scratch pads couple with retinal scans, but nobody's going to pay for that infrastructure.
Bottom line, patch your software, get a firewall, be carfeul about opening email, don't use IE or Outlook, and do virus/spyware scans regularly. You'll be safe from all but the most determined hackers, and they don't care about your password.
McGyver would ony have to look in the episode script to find the password!
If you are worried about securely storing passwords, you should check out this application: KeePass. My Favorite feature is that you can randomly generate a password, copy and past the password (which is displayed as asterisks) from the application to the destination, and never know what your password is. It works natively in windows and runs on Wine in Linux.
As I posted above, back in the Win3.1x era, I did peruse my permanent swapfile with a hex viewer, and found data therein that was over 3 years old. (At the time, the Win3.1 setup wasn't much older than that, and with 32mb RAM -- a lot for Win16 -- the swapfile was seldom touched.) Passwords which I knew for a fact were encrypted on disk, and didn't exist anywhere else in plaintext format, had passed through the swapfile AS plaintext, exactly as typed. Win32 swapfiles tend to be too large to conveniently view, but when I've looked at 'em, they aren't that different from Win16 (tho I've noticed Win32 pagefiles have a lot more "white space").
:) There's lots of binary gibberish, but also a lot of obviously identifiable structures, such as big chunks of documents, logfiles, and the like; in my observation, it tends to be heavy on files that are written and rewritten to disk in a given session, and light on other stuff.
For the most part, the swapfile is tolerably readable, in about the same way a memory dump is, or the compressed volume file on a Doublespaced hard disk (yes, I've looked at those too
I know someone who has indeed recovered lost documents from the swapfile after a crash, courtesy of a hex editor. If you know what the document header looks like, you can just search for that and chances are the whole thing will be right there behind it.
I'm not a coder and I may have this wrong, but to my understanding, unless RAM is specifically cleared, it's kindof like "deleted" data on a HD -- the segment is marked not in use, but data isn't actually removed until something else overwrites it (either more data, or a tool to zero out the old data). So just about anything *could* stick around if not deliberately killed off.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Remeber kids, the most popular OS (which shall remain nameless, *cough* Windows *cough*) does not have secure memory, so it's not too far of a strech to assume that even as you input a password into a dialog box it may swap it out to disk (if, say, you happen to be copying a raw DVD image from one drive to another).
Must-not-watch TV!
My password is stored on a public mirror...
One of the systems I use requires 10+ char with a variety upper/lower/special/etc.
Forgot this so I went to the reset link and was given the form to reset which required 2 pre-asked questions(pet name and birth place) along with info which was available on my info page.
The only safe guard was that I got a piece of e-mail sent to the predefined e-mail address alerting me of the change.
The really bad thing is that this is not a unique site, almost all sites I am on allow you to reset your password with just some earlier given info. The bester ones(with no e-mail themselves) then sent the password to you.
I just use a bootable CD and run it all in RAM, the shutdown sequence wipes the disk. In addition, I don't use phones,credit cards, I burn all of my garbage, I walk everywhere I go (at night only).
wait...everyone is looking at me! STOP STARING AT ME!!!
It doesn't matter how OLD a password is. For security, all that matters is how well a password is kept.
If it's used by multiple parties, transfered in different ways, etc., it might improve security to change it regularly. But if it's used very rarely, and kept written on a piece of paper that's sitting inside a fireproof safe & only one person has an access key, it can still be a very secure password even after years.
What matters is the opportunities evil parties might have to obtain it, and if changing a password involves transferring it somehow, than that is just one more possible moment where 'evil parties' could intercept it.
Go download Eraser. It will erase empty space and swap files using DoD mil quality and even higher. It will erase empty space on your drive while you sleeping swiping it clean of bits 32 times over. On shutdown it will erase the swap file with the same quality. You can also get the source code and make it better if you want.
I have mine run once a week. I'm more concerned of my hard drive failing having to returning it under warranty and someone else receiving that drive they could then retrieve my data.
computers are secure. People are unsecure.
We have a utility that formats all of our surplus drives (and all the drives we re-deploy internally, as well) to DoD 5220.22-M. You can buy consumer software that does the same thing. No problems.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I only hastily read the given article, but it seems to me that the persons cited within wish for the software developers to write their software so entered passwords should be kept on RAM for the shortest possible time ('Garfinkel hopes the results will galvanise software developers into action'). While I do believe developers should take the measures necessary for the security of the user, I also believe the greatest security vulnerability to a computer system still is the user. One does not need to be a hacker to obtain someone's password -- it is so easy, basically everyone can do it.
I would like to point out that this is not an incitation to acquire someone else's password; I am just saying how easy it is to obtain one -- of course, I am not giving depict details. You need to download a specific keylogging software, with which you can create a remote keylogger which can periodically send you logs and screenshots by e-mail and is simply dissimulated within another executable -- think a Flash animation, for example. All you need to do is subsequently send the keylogger to the person you desire to spy on, who will open it and see the content of the executable of your choice while the keylogger is installed.
I find this rather scary myself, but I think it just goes to show that more than software developers, it is the users who should take precautions. (The keylogger can be removed with Spybot Search & Destroy or Norton Antivirus 2004.)
Operating systems such as Windows and Linux have no facility for stopping data being written to the hard drive.
That's a flat out lie.
$ man mlock
MLOCK(2) Linux Programmer's Manual MLOCK(2)
NAME
mlock - disable paging for some parts of memory
SYNOPSIS
#include
int mlock(const void *addr, size_t len);
DESCRIPTION
mlock disables paging for the memory in the range starting at addr with length len bytes.
OpenSSH uses paging protection. It also zeroes out the password in memory. Immediately upon hashing it. I've seen the code.
Authors are at Stanford? Paper at USENIX? Can't believe this shit.
"Perhaps the ultimate solution would be to encrypt data as it is entered, before it is saved into RAM, and arrange for programs that use it to decrypt it first."
Sheesh! Where is the input buffer located? The decrypted password en-route the application or site? They're in RAM, of course. What this proposal assures is that the plaintext password will be in RAM more times than if the proposal is not adopted.
Sigh....
That's why OpenBSD allows you to encrypt your swap.
Provos wrote this in 2001: Encrypting Virtual Memory
Nah, don't run to the hills. Just get a new hard drive for every session that you use your computer. Sure it's a pain to reinstall your operating system a zillion times, but soon you'll do the install in your sleep. When your done using your computer smash the hard drive (so no one can get a hold of your information) that's real "security". Who would have thought it would be so simple. Your wallet might not thank you but at least you'll have "peace of mind" knowing that your data is secure [even from yourself]!
Besides there are snakes in them hills and I'd actually like to live another day to do a reinstall and another "secure" computing session ^_^
The problem of swap containing sensitive data from running programs was addressed some time ago by OpenBSD. They generate a random key at boot time and use it to encrypt reads and writes to swap. By definition, you are not interested in the contents of swap the next time you boot up, so you can start with a brand new key. Not only is swap space secure against fishing expeditions like in TFA, but it's also secure against someone getting read privileges on the raw disk (unless they also get permissions on kernel memory and can go look up the key).
Too bad more systems don't embrace the idea.
The problem is that everywhere wants a password. For some places it's perfectly logical (banking comes to mind), but then you have a lot of services that, even though they are free, require a password (like NYT). Now, every time I order something it seems the online retailer requires an account. I can't just enter my information and order something, I have to create an account.
Then when you add in slashdot and all the other time wasters (as if NYT isn't one also), you end up with dozens of passwords.
So what do you do? Either you need to write them down somewhere, or you use the same name and password for each account. That's wonderful, of course, once one insecure site gets hacked, someone knows your name and password for all of them.
One solution to this problem would be if websites weren't so password happy. They all pretend like they are the only sites on the net, so you won't mind. What's the point when it's free anyway? There are other ways to make sure content is only accessed from your site (no deep linking), like looking at referrer information, or cookies.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
A simple, though extreme solution is to reinstall your OS every few months. I find Windows 2000 slows to a crawl after 12 months or so, so I backup my files and reinstall the machine. Bye-bye hidden passwords! I'm surprised that Microsoft has not promoted this as a feature for their products.
However, a big threat comes from people who hack into your machine. I've seen numerous home computers that have all their passwords stored in a passwords directory, so their owner does not have to remember them. Anyone who has gained access to their machine can simply copy one directory and access their bank, email account, web site, and other personal records.
This program seems to take all these concerns into account. Evidence Eraser I dont know how well it works but the resident pedorast here at work swears by it.
Non-System foot or foot error. remove from mouth and strike any key when ready
Only the swapfile needs to go on the ramdrive :-)
Many operating systems, to comply with the rainbow book security standards, zero out any memory or disk space provided to applications. The problem is that this is done when a resource is reused, not when a resource is freed. How difficult would it be to instead immediately zero memory/disk upon deallocation?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I love this. Be sure your program encrypts the password before it ever enters RAM! Of course this could be tricky, but I'm sure you'll work out the magic (hint - solution involves clairvoyance, but I hear Alienware's top machines can do that).
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Such as for animating paperclips?
What about that friendly cute walligator that offered himself to store my passwords for me late this moring?
That's actually a very good point.
:)
I suppose the only way to take care of this... in Windows, would be to create a separate partition solely for the swap file have a boot batch file run that would format/0000 the swap file drive each time the system is restarted. (of course, if doing this from command prompt, it would require the partition to be formatted to FAT32, ew. No thanks.)
Also... of course, the first thing I did when I got my load o' RAM, was to try to run without a swap file at all.
Amazingly, everything was splendid until I tried to print something. Bloody HP printer bloat crap. If there's anything I'd like to see open source/custom drivers made for, it would be the HP All-in-One printer/scanner things. The install is over 100MB. >_
but... yes, apparently my printer "needs" a swap file present to spool. I don't understand why it can't just spool to RAM.
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Don't lead some newb astray...
Gator is spyware, KeePass is not.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I keep client info in an encrypted text file (clients.txt.gpg) with most client enrties on a single line and access it this way:
gpg --decrypt client.txt.gpg | grep Smith
Enter password:
Which outputs the info for Smith to the terminal like this:
Joe Smith http://hissite.com Login: joes Password: hispasswordhere
Then "wipe" it from the screen with CTRL L
I think that offers a reasonable solution to security vs. convenience.
sahuaro
Phoenix Linux Users Group
Penguins in the desert
I tried a dozen times and didn't find a pronouncable one. Then again, English is my first language, not jibberish.
Of course, I've used the same password for years and nobody's figured it out yet.
Or maybe you've used the same password for years and haven't figured out that somebody else has.
The problem of password retention on swap partitions has been known for years. OpenBSD, for example, automatically encrypts the swap partition with rotating keys so that information becomes automatically when it gets stale, i.e. even before reboot. There is a paper on this called Encrypting Virtual Memory. Makes for an interesting read.
Levels are good. I suppose anyone with my single login for all newspaper web sites could get me carted away by the secret service within hours, but it is convenient all around.
The _important_ stuff is compiled onto a file on a Bochs cylinder with a heck of a pass phrase for the blowfish encryption. Called from a parameterized batch file with a Norton wipefile on editor close. I figure short of a tin foil hat and RFI grounding the room that should be adequate protection against individuals.
for windows users, specifically:
:)
1) Install Mozilla and use that as your default browser. IE is a huge security hole, and should only be used for windows update.
2) Don't download those free screensavers, or other neat little toys, that you find all over the web. You really don't need them, and most of them come with adware, spyware, or worse. If you must download free stuff, take extra steps to learn what they come with, such as reading the EULA and user feedback. If you have no means of finding this out, then just say "no."
3) Don't install browser toolbars. Install as few browser plugins as possible, and try to keep them to the list of generally trusted plugins (shock, flash, quicktime, java).
4) Don't click on banner ads, pop up ads, or anything that says you have won something or can get something for free.
5) Delete spam and do not respond to it (don't bother to unsubscribe).
Overwrite with all 111s then all 000s then alternating 1010 then alternating 0101.
the original person who used Orion Blastar had a hard drive that he left the passwords on and sold to me on eBay. Now I have the passwords to all his accounts. Running data recovery programs and probing the virtual memory file can be very useful.
;)
Of course, nobody noticed the difference when I took over all his accounts in 1999 and kept on posting in the same style that he did.
Well not really, I am the original Orion Blastar, and this post was yet another one of my jokes, ala Andy Kaufman. At least that is what I want you to believe, muahahah!
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I once bought a Microvax from an place where a co-worker had been a decade or two earlier. I ran crack on /etc/passwd. Interestingly, only a handful of the hundreds of accounts had guessable passwords. But guess who still used the same one?
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
open4free © : Osakas Lomortal Otejo Des
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Perhaps the ultimate solution would be to encrypt data as it is entered, before it is saved into RAM, and arrange for programs that use it to decrypt it first. That would be a nice one.. a program that can encrypt a password that is not stored in ram..
Are you aware that the Keychain spec supports freeform encrypted notes? Open Keychain Access, go up to the toolbar, and click on the "Note" icon.
Keychain also supports other types of data like X.509 private keys and certificates. If you are using S/MIME email via Mail.app, all of the certificates and private keys are stored in your keychain.
You can have multiple keychains. There is the default login keychain that exists for every user, and is unlocked on login. However, you can have as many other keychains as you want, each with its own password. Each can be locked or unlocked individually, and if an app calls the Keychain API any items that are on a currently locked keychain will raise a dialog asking the user to unlock the keychain as needed. I store banking info, server keys, etc. in encrypted notes on a second keychain.
Lastly, there are a couple of security settings that really ought to be on by default, but aren't: Lock when sleeping and lock after 5 (or 10 or 15) minutes of inactivity.
--Paul
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If I need to make a purchase, I reboot into knoppix and do it from there.
Take this one: 'fuquwimu' Sound it out. foo-coo-wee-moo. Simple, stupid, and easy to remember. But very hard to guess. Two clicks got that one. Keep trying and you get ones like horanori, xepufado, or wamodahu. (Adding a mnemonic to remember the first few chars, like using XP for 'xepufado' will help you remember it better.)
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
look in their bash (or tcsh or whatever their fav flavor is) history.
Seriously. Have you ever accidentally typed your password instead of your username? Grep your history for your password and see what you find.
A swap file is just a bunch of disk pages that the OS uses to back application pages. A page in swap will contain one page of application memory (unless it's a new swap file, and thus blank). The mapping of application virtual memory to swap pages is generally held in RAM and not swapped, though, so if the data you're looking for is more than 4kB in size, you'll have to search for both pages manually. The OS can't know that a given page has sensitive data except through memory locking primitives, and memory locking can cause a local denial of service, so it is usually restricted.
Asks to Travis Dane how to get those passwords from the Steven Segal's film "Siege 2: Dark Territory".
open4free ©
"Operating systems such as Windows and Linux have no facility for stopping data being written to the hard drive."
Incorrect. Set the page file to 0 and watch Win2000/03 run dog slow. Or, configure Win2000/03 to erase its page file when the computer shuts down.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/gp/567.asp
Is this new news? Maybe to some. However, the problem with many of these new Microsoft engineers is that they do not read the manual or pay attention during the MCSE courses.
My two cents (and yes, I am an MCSE).
Whenever I am programming an encryption program or something that needs to be secure, I use a bit eraser algorithm that is modeled after one presented in th book "Secure Programming in C and C++" (very good book btw. Very Practical) I am surprised no one has written open source for a cron job that does the same thing.
Can I mod this article as "Troll"? Please?
Nathan's blog
These are some of the things molecules do...... given 4 billion years -Carl Sagan
for i in $( seq 100 ); do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/${whatever}; done
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
... someone else receiving that drive they could then retrieve my data.
Of course, by "data", you mean p0rn and pirated MP3s, right?
Altough this might sound like an ad (it is not - it is not commercial) one might take a look at 'libsd': libsd makes ALL applications on your system do a secure delete without changing a single line of code.
It does this by intercepting calls like 'unlink' (delete files) and 'truncate': before deleting or truncating a file, the previous contents is first overwritten with garbage which is forced to disk.
So if you use this library and you delete a file with a password in it, that password should not be recoverable (altough it might still reside in your swappartition...).
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
This is the media version of an academic paper for USENIX Security '04. It glosses over a lot of details.
Examples:
- mlock(). Available to root only under Linux, so useless outside of setuid programs - and we all have so many of those we trust, right?
- VirtualLock()/VirtualUnlock(). Win32 versions of mlock(). Not implemented in the 9x series, advisory in a few other Windowses (I can't find the docs on where, but it's in the original paper).
- zeroing memory. Oops, your optimizing compiler just optimized away that memset() call as dead code. This was a known flaw in some crypto libraries a few years ago.
The system described is a whole-system simulator, it traces bytes of input from the moment they pass the keyboard through the kernel, into the user-mode applications that use the bytes (e.g. kernel to X server to Mozilla), and how long those bytes hang around in the physical RAM of the machine.
This does not necessarily describe a highly practical attack, but more a quantification of how vunerable systems are to such an attack. In fact, the original paper is about data lifetime information.
- Did you know the most recent 4K keystrokes (passwords included) are stored in the kernel's tty buffer?
- Did you know several dozen of your keystrokes are stored in the Linux kernel's entropy buffer (for random number generation)? They aren't actually consumed for as long as several hours.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
I have a small circuit incorporating a basic stamp and some optical isolators that I designed to remember my passwords, it hooks up to the PS/2 port between the computer and keyboard. It is capable of reading keys presses so I can use something like CTRL-SHIFT-1 to have it type in username1 enter password1 enter etc..
Next revision will include a serial lcd module to allow me to display info and some code to generate random passwords, can easily store/enter very long passwords this ay.
The point is Gates recommended data center servers to be rebooted weekly for stability. We had stable systems up for 3 months, counter to Gates' advice. These were 24/7/365 servers with intended 99.999% uptime (with exceptions allowed for scheduled maintenance windows). Due to that and the load this was a bit of an accomplishment at the time. (largish exchange servers, DBs, file servers, WINS, and domain controllers with regular in-service backups for roughly 60+ core servers in multiple geographic locations and subnets with over 5,000 users with at least one machine each - and that was within 1 domain. The total numbered in the 100s of thousands of users that I personally saw, and yes, this is enough information to figure out whom I'm talking about) In 2 years, we only had 1 problem meeting the SLA - the initial email virus, Melissa I think it was.
We managed this feat by hacking the servers down to only necessary services and placing them in an architecture designed to overcome MS OS's shortcomings, of which there were many.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
nahhhhhhh man ! Use da alien anal probe!
I've taken it a step further. I got a password manager for my mobile phone and I keep everything encrypted in there. Each website gets an unique e-mail and password e.g. ebay@mydomain.com 4jd74jks. As I don't need to remember the passwords, each one is random gobblegook. I always have the phone anywhere I am, so I don't have to worry about someone messing with it without me knowing.
The password manager is doubly secure as the phone is also locked and the only way to unlock it without the correct code erases the internal storage, along with the password file.
Of course, this still leaves a major vunerability; compromised machines. The next improvement would be using a one-time password system. Then if you get your details tracked by a keylogger, virus or any other technique described in this thread, it really doesn't matter as the password is worthless the moment it gets used.
As soon as someone does this for mobile phones, I'm on it!! Of course, it will only work for systems I own, but they are the ones I care about the most. My credit card insurance takes care of the rest, and I could handle the karma loss if this account got hijacked... ;-)
For everything else, there is KWallet.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
all you have to do is copy the directory or file to another device using admin rights, which the repair guy would need to repair the system, and the encryption is decrypted and the files are readable.
M$ security is no security, again.
Shhhhhh...
-cmh
you'd have an easier time rolling back the charge on the toner cartridge... get the bit o the last page that way..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
This would kill two birds with one stone.
I imagine it would be a pain to do data recovery on system like that.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
All the 100 hard drives and laptops purchased as part of Pointsec's research will be destroyed.
Jeez, we're not talking about lab rats here. How about wiping them and donating them to a non-profit?
The more sophisticated (ie, non-GNU) operating
systems, such as OpenBSD and its derivates MirOS
and ekkoBSD, have had encrypted swap, although
disabled by default, for years.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
the use of a 'task list' generated from 'TODO' comments in source code
Dat's OK, cos Big Blue still got dibs on "/* */" from PL/1.
The 64 bit race is already in full swing. The most common apps that will benefit most from 64 bits are DBs, along with a slew of specialty apps that do large data manipulation. If systems like Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, Postgres, and yes, even MS SQL all start running on AMD machines, it's pretty much over. My opinion from what I've seen of these chips is that this trend will be in full swing by year end. Once it starts, Intel's barrier to 64 bit CPUs rises significantly. (Forget the Itanium 2, who the hell in their right mind would by a single CPU system for the cost of an 8-way NUMA system that blows its doors off? Ok, that might be a little bit of an exageration, the cost of a dual Itanium 2 system...;) Tests I've seen show that a dual opteron system can outperform a loaded Sun V880 (don't know the exact specs on the Sun box, but it did have 8 processors).
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Supposedly out in Oct or Nov, from what I recall hearing. (Too lazy to look it up) The initial performance numbers for memory are pretty incredible, and may make it a "must have" for high end gamers and the like, just to squeeze out that extra framerate or 3 beyond 120 fps... I mean, you know you just cannot play a game unless the frame rate is at least a nice smooth 120 fps. That aside, I don't think it's going to be quite that long, perhaps 1-2 years. Things seem to be changing ever faster in some areas, while others seem to stay stagnant (MS OSes and Office, for instance;)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Oh boy. Where to start? :)
First a quick discussion of OSes. I ran NT/OS/2 since somewhere around 91. Don't recall the exact dates, so the entire issue of Windows hardware vs OS/2 hardware was irrelevant to me, other than OS/2 blew NT's socks off on the same hardware. I bet WFW did require less hardware than OS/2, then again, try running an SMTP gateway, FTP daemon, NNTP daemon, Telnet daemon, WordPerfect (DOS), and Cadkey on a WFW box concurrently. ;) Ran fine on a loaded 486.
Describe? You got that one? Cool. Been a while since I've even heard of that one. ClearLook kicked its butt in practice though (of course, imho only;). I too have some oddities in the old closet for OS/2, including 2.1, 2.3, 2.4, and Warp3 server (should be version 2.3 Server, but not sure):
- BackMaster
- Avarice
- Object Desktop (think WindowsBlinds 10 years earlier, and richer - Stardock rules!)
- Patrol
- Borland's C compiler
- Some collection of OS/2 games, includes things like a DigDug clone
Don't think I have ClearLook anymore, that probably got lost over the years, as well as my registered copy of Graham's utilities.To me, what killed WP was that it completely sucked on windows, compared to Word, for 90% of the populace. They wanted simple WYSIWYG, Word gave it to them, WP was clunkier than crap, and unstable to boot (not that Word was all that stable either). Oh, and there was an extremely badly hacked port of WP5.2 to OS/2. It was so unstable, it actually occassionally forced a reboot of OS/2, something the emulated windows versions never managed to do.
I ran WP6.1 for a while, and it was much better for writing more desktop published type papers, but finally the inertia of the rest of the world forced us into Word. Shame really.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.