GnuPG Daemon?

[David Turner]

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On Fri, 25 May 2001, Werner Koch wrote:

> On Fri, 25 May 2001, clemensF wrote:
> 
> > in what way?  recovering the passphrase should be hard for root as well.
> 
> There 42 and more ways for root to do _everything_. 
> 
> What about attaching strace to a running gpg or replacing the gpg
> binary with a version whichs logs passphrases or just tracing all
> syscalls or pty dataflows.

Or something similar.  There is even a vulnerability in OpenPGP that if
you can replace a secret key temporarily then intercept a badly-signed
message, you can get the true secret key.  But that involves actually
mucking around with cryptography; my method of choice would be to replace
the gpg binary.

> > > * Could they make it dump core and rip the passphrase from that? If it
> > > dumped core, the passphrase would be readily available.  In a perfect
> 
> Programs which handle sensitive information should disable core
> dumps - this is pretty easo on most systems.

Didn't know this.  How?  (Reply directly if this is too OT for the list)

> > a passphrase could be encrypted time-limited, the program could recrypt it
> > from time to time, so it would not stay unencrypted in memory too long.
> 
> And where do you keep the key for this encryption ?!

... unencrypted, in memory!

Anyway, I'm off to practise my paranoia some more :-)

- -- 
Dave Turner
dct25@cam.ac.uk                 http://www.geocities.com/dcturner2000/
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