Re: mlock(1)

[Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@novell.com>]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 10:48:50AM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> > > There must be some way of being able to check the password is correct
> > > without compromising security by encrypting static text and storing it
> > > at a known location! Darned if I know what it is though.
> > 
> > good point! Maybe we can pick random signed chars in a 4k block and
> > guarantee their sum is always -123456. Would that be secure against
> > plaintext attack right? It's more like a checksum than a magic number,
> > but it should be a lot more secure than the "double" typo probability
> > (and this way the password will be asked only once during resume).
> > Generating those random numbers will not be the easiest thing though.
> 
> Actually, better solution probably is to encrypt 32-bit zero.
> 
> Then, you have 1:2^32 probability of accepting wrong password, still
> if you try to brute-force it, you'll find many possible passwords.

this is just the first step an attacker needs to rule out all the
impossible passwords and extend the crack to the other known bits. I
don't think it's secure. My suggestion OTOH sounds completely secure
(though much harder to implement).