[Cryptography] Swift and cryptography

[Bill Frantz]

On 6/12/14 at 10:37 AM, petertrei at gmail.com (Peter Trei) wrote:

>1. OSs supply memory management services. For efficiency, they generally
>don't clear
>memory when it's returned to the pool, or when reallocated.
>2. OSs swap program space to disk and back. Same problem as above.
>3. Machine level stack operations move the SP up and down, without clearing
>memory
>that's been popped off.

OSs protect processes from each other. If you have data from 
more than one security context in a single process, you can't 
depend on the OS for protection. Use multiple processes and IPC. 
PostFix is a working example of this kind of architecture.

Consider Heartbleed for example. If OpenSSL is used to set up 
TLS sessions for a server which creates a separate process for 
each connection, at least the OpenSSL private key signing 
operations need to be performed in a separate process because 
otherwise the connection's security context is being mixed with 
the server's security context (the server's private key).

I wrote such a server for CapROS which had this bug. (CapROS 
makes interprocess communication easy and fast.) The only saving 
grace is the version of OpenSSL I used was from before 
Heartbleed was introduced into the code base.

Cheers - Bill

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