Use |mprotect()| to secure key data ? / was: Re: Proposal: always handle keys in separate process

[Ángel González]

On 20/01/16 00:18, Roland Mainz wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 11:53 PM, Ángel González<keisial at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> That won't work when the data was recovered because it was read inside
>> a stdio buffer which was not overwritten before being freed.
> Why is stdio used in such a security-sensitive area anyway ? Is there
> any performance impact if the code is switched to plain { |open()|,
> |read()|, ... } (with sufficient wrappers for |EINTR| handling) ?

Probably not, and in fact I would favor changing it.

I was just pointing out that the private key leak was not in OpenSSH buffers,
which were properly zeroed, but from things like the use of stdio buffers.

Best regards