Kmem security (was: Re: How do you make your UNIX crash ???)

[Magnus Olsson]

In article <601 at minya.UUCP> jc at minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
>In article <1991Mar18.153201.23325 at lth.se>, magnus%thep.lu.se at Urd.lth.se (Magnus Olsson) writes:
>> That doesn't mean, of course, that you can't get passwords from /dev/kmem -
>> login has to keep the entered password somewhere before it encrypts it!
> 
>Sorry, but this is bogus.
> 
>True, login has to keep the password somewhere, but that somewhere isn't
>in /dev/kmem; it is in login's address space.
>
>What is true is that it has to get it from somewhere, and it does that via
>a read(), meaning that the somewhere it gets it from is inside /dev/kmem.
>
>[Picky, picky, picky!  ;-]


To be *really* picky, I didn't say that login *did* keep passwords in /dev/kmem, 
but only that it wasn't necessarily true that it didn't. :-)

Seriously, I thought the entire virtual memory of the machine was accessible
through /dev/kmem. Why isn't login's address space?

Magnus Olsson                   | \e+      /_
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