Déjà Dup

Passwords aren't protected in-memory

Bug #284512 reported by Michael Terry
334
This bug affects 18 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Déjà Dup
Confirmed
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Passwords aren't protected in-memory. deja-dup gets them from gnome-keyring, and just holds them plaintext in memory. This should really be improved.

Michael Terry (mterry)
Changed in deja-dup:
status: New → Confirmed
Michael Terry (mterry)
Changed in deja-dup:
importance: Undecided → Medium
Revision history for this message
Michael Terry (mterry) wrote :

Likewise, when passing them to duplicity, they are stored in the child process's environment. I believe Linux protects other processes' environments, but that doing so is not guaranteed across POSIX. This would require changes in duplicity to allow passing passwords another way (via pipes or whatnot).

Michael Terry (mterry)
Changed in deja-dup:
importance: Medium → Low
Revision history for this message
mlissner (mlissner-michaeljaylissner) wrote :

As a budding programmer, I'm curious how you can read the values in memory? Seems hard, but if you're willing to tell me, I'm quite curious.

Revision history for this message
Michael Terry (mterry) wrote :

I believe when it is paged to the swap area. Which usually isn't encrypted. I don't know how easy it is to grab the values once it is in the swap, but I think that's the general idea.

We could prevent this by using libgnome-keyring's non-pageable memory support: http://developer.gnome.org/gnome-keyring/stable/gnome-keyring-Non-pageable-Memory.html

papukaija (papukaija)
security vulnerability: no → yes
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