Newbie Q: decryption

[Tobias Weisserth]

Hi there,

On Tuesday, 27. February 2007 02:56, Joseph Oreste Bruni wrote:
> Oh yeah, third thing:
>
> The "insecure memory" warning just means that the executable probably
> needs to be setuid-root in order to allocate wired memory. You can
> ignore this and still use the product. It just means that gpg tried
> to allocate memory that cannot be swapped to disk and failed due to
> permissions. Some OS's allow non-root users to allocate a limited
> amount of wired memory (BSD, OS X) whereas HP-UX does not.

Having GnuPG use swap partitions/files is a risky business. There's another 
way around this mess without having to make the GnuPG binary setuid. If you 
don't use Windows simply encrypt swap space. OpenBSD does this by default, 
Mac OS X can be set up to do it and swap partition encryption in GNU/Linux is 
trivial to setup too. Maybe there should be an option in GnuPG to disable 
this warning when compiling it on a platform that does swap encryption 
anyway.

Take a look here too:
https://www.weisserth.eu/index.php/2007/01/13/encrypting-your-swap-partition-with-opensuse-102/

Hope this helps,

Tobias