KPasswordDialog

[George Staikos]

On Friday 05 November 2004 09:06, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 05, 2004 at 07:42:08AM -0500, George Staikos wrote:
> > On Thursday 04 November 2004 19:06, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> > > The other threat is that passwords are written to the swap partition.
> > > This can only be countered by using mlock'ed char* memory. mlocking
> > > QString is impossible (unless you or Qt writes QSecureString).
> >
> >   That's cool, we can provide a mechanism to prevent people from stealing
> > passwords of out KPasswordDialog and instead force them to steal it from
> > whatever uses KPasswordDialog. :)   Really.....  I know the argument
> > you're making and I think it's rather pointless for this.  If someone
> > needs a KSecuredButNotVeryUserFriendlyOri18nCompatiblePasswordDialog,
> > they can use a separate one or a fork of the existing one made more
> > secure.
>
> fwiw, what is your stance on
> http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87580 :
> KDE [KDM] does not mlock sensitive data (password)
> ?
> imo this is a cantfix for the PAM case, and a wontfix for the other
> cases.

  Funny, I read this report just yesterday and I thought the same thing as 
you.  It's even more funny to try to reconcile this with reports that people 
want KDM to save the login password and send it through to KWallet after 
login.

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/