Secure text editor?

Alessandro Vesely vesely at tana.it
Wed May 16 09:10:10 CEST 2007


Peter Lebbing wrote:
> Alessandro Vesely talked about snooping in the memory space of the process.
> Yes, if your computer is compromised, all activity at that moment is also
> compromised. The thing with swapspace though, is that the plaintext remains
> on disk long after you've edited the file!

Aha! Forcing oblivion for that text is a good point. The swap probably also
includes any buffer used by the windowing system and the like. A system trace
of any write access to the disk would provide a comprehensive list, including
any "plaintext~" or similar stuff, independently of the editor used. If you
are not too paranoid, a simple wrapper, a la strace, that only looks for write
access by the editor and possible forks thereof, might suffice.

I'd bet some tool like that exists already, but have no pointer at hand.





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