phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] further limitation: not writing secret to memory

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Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 11:45:28 -0700
From: Larry Bugbee <bugbee@....com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] further limitation: not writing secret to memory


On Sep 19, 2013, at 10:04 AM, Sergey V. wrote:

> On 2013-09-18 at 20:48:41, Krisztián Pintér <pinterkr@...il.com> wrote:
>> Steve Thomas (at Wednesday, September 18, 2013, 7:58:25 PM):
>>> I'm pretty sure page locked memory [...] never gets written to swap.
>> 
>> on a windows box, there are multiple ways of telling the OS not to swap 
>> a memory block. but neither of those guarantees anything. i'm not a 
>> linux guy, but as i'm informed, you can't do that ony linux either.
> 
> I suppose mlock(2) should works on linux.

But while that or something else might lock on Linux, there might be no way to reliably lock on other platforms.  If that be the case, the algorithm is not really appropriate if one might need to re-host on a different platform later.