security

Baby, bathwater

Submitted by reeses on Fri, 2004-08-13 11:52. | |

http://www.astrogoth.com/~reeses/media/blanklooks.jpg

From macosxhints

Research has shown that swap files can contain passwords from File Vault, login and Key Chain - nullifying the protection they provide.

Let's take a look...

(09:06) reeses@Miette:vm$ pwd
/private/var/vm
(09:06) reeses@Miette:vm$ ls -l
total 524288
-rw------T  1 root  wheel   67108864  9 Aug 15:24 swapfile0
-rw------T  1 root  wheel   67108864 10 Aug 15:04 swapfile1
-rw------T  1 root  wheel  134217728 13 Aug 08:57 swapfile2
(09:06) reeses@Miette:vm$

So, one would need to have root access to access the data contained within the swapfile? Quel surprise.