Re: secure storage of sensitive data in J2EE

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 00:36:41 GMT, Antoine Martin said:
> On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 14:41 -0500, Kevin Conaway wrote:
> > A followup question:
> >
> > Once the data (be it a password or a key) has been read into memory,
> > what is an effective and secure way of minimizing the window that the
> > plaintext key or password is in memory?
> >
> > If the data is read into a char [] and then overwritten with junk
> > data, would that work?
> Not if your buffer gets swapped out beforehand, but the window of
> opportunity remains short.

If you are on a system where you can use mlock(), that can help minimize
the swapped-out-buffer issue.  Not sure if you can get at mlock() from the J2EE
environment, though....

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