[PATCH] encrypt suspend data for easy wiping

The patch protects from leaking sensitive data after resume from suspend.
During suspend a temporary key is created and this key is used to encrypt the
data written to disk.  When, during resume, the data was read back into memory
the temporary key is destroyed which simply means that all data written to
disk during suspend are then inaccessible so they can't be stolen lateron.

Think of the following: you suspend while an application is running that keeps
sensitive data in memory.  The application itself prevents the data from being
swapped out.  Suspend, however, must write these data to swap to be able to
resume lateron.  Without suspend encryption your sensitive data are then
stored in plaintext on disk.  This means that after resume your sensitive data
are accessible to all applications having direct access to the swap device
which was used for suspend.  If you don't need swap after resume these data
can remain on disk virtually forever.  Thus it can happen that your system
gets broken in weeks later and sensitive data which you thought were encrypted
and protected are retrieved and stolen from the swap device.

Signed-off-by: Andreas Steinmetz <ast@domdv.de>
Acked-by: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This commit is contained in:
Andreas Steinmetz
2005-09-03 15:56:59 -07:00
committed by Linus Torvalds
parent 583a4e88db
commit c2ff18f407
2 changed files with 171 additions and 5 deletions

View File

@@ -72,6 +72,18 @@ config PM_STD_PARTITION
suspended image to. It will simply pick the first available swap
device.
config SWSUSP_ENCRYPT
bool "Encrypt suspend image"
depends on SOFTWARE_SUSPEND && CRYPTO=y && (CRYPTO_AES=y || CRYPTO_AES_586=y || CRYPTO_AES_X86_64=y)
default ""
---help---
To prevent data gathering from swap after resume you can encrypt
the suspend image with a temporary key that is deleted on
resume.
Note that the temporary key is stored unencrypted on disk while the
system is suspended.
config SUSPEND_SMP
bool
depends on HOTPLUG_CPU && X86 && PM