Thread (25 messages) 25 messages, 7 authors, 2020-07-07

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


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
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