Re: [RFC]: mm,power: introduce MADV_WIPEONSUSPEND
From: Colm MacCárthaigh <hidden>
Date: 2020-07-04 01:33:15
Also in:
linux-api, linux-mm, linux-pm
From: Colm MacCárthaigh <hidden>
Date: 2020-07-04 01:33:15
Also in:
linux-api, linux-mm, linux-pm
On 3 Jul 2020, at 4:04, Jann Horn wrote:
quoted
- Provides a simple mechanism to avoid RAM exfiltration during traditional sleep/hibernate on a laptop or desktop when memory, and thus secrets, are vulnerable to offline tampering or inspection.For the first usecase, I wonder which way around this would work better - do the wiping when a VM is saved, or do it when the VM is restored? I guess that at least in some scenarios, doing it on restore would be nicer because that way the hypervisor can always instantly save a VM without having to wait for the guest to say "alright, I'm ready" - especially if someone e.g. wants to take a snapshot of a running VM while keeping it running? Or do hypervisors inject such ACPI transitions every time they snapshot/save/restore a VM anyway?
Just to answer this - I’d expect wipe-after-save rather than wipe-on-restore to be common for some. That provides the most defense against secrets ending up on disk or some other durable medium when the VM images are being saved. - Colm