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Remailer passphrases
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On Mon, 11 Mar 1996, Gary Howland wrote:
> This of course assumes that the remailer runs as a process - if it doesn't
> then there is no reason a 'remailer helper' cannot.
>
> The only disadvantage of this is that the remailer cannot be rebooted
> without a passphrase being entered, but then there are ways around this
> (entering the passphrase remotely over a secure link etc., or more
> sophisticated 'remote authorisation' systems).
>
> The advantage of this is that the password is never on the disk,
> only in memory (which will take serious (read "expensive") to extract).
I don't know that it would be that expensive. If someone was able to gain
root access to the system, something like "strings /dev/kmem" could narrow
the search for the passphrase down significantly. Of course one could
obfuscate the passphrase by XOR'ing it with 0x80, but that's only security
through obscrurity.
- --Mark
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