Re: mlock(1)

From: Andrea Arcangeli
Date: Thu Sep 30 2004 - 14:24:20 EST


On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 08:54:47PM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Actually if your cipher is not resistant to known plaintext attack,

AFIK the only way to make it resistent to a brute force is to make it
slow, like adding lots of bits of salt.

> you have other problems anyway. There's a lot of nearly-lnown data
> (like name of process with pid 1) that single 32bit zero is no problem.

You could fix that later, by changing the offset randomly before writing
it to disk.

My point is very simple, that is if you leave a zero as part of the API,
then you're making things less secure.
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