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10.4: Two hints related to swap files
Authored by: Gerk on May 20, '05 02:53:40PM

the protected VM is not just for the paranoid. if it's not a big performance hit everyone should use it, dare I say they make it the default ... if you want to see something interesting do a strings command on the VM file ... you can see all sorts of nastiness that you shouldn't be able to like unencrypted usernames/passwords for all users on the machine, regardless of your user access (everyone can read the vm file)



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10.4: Two hints related to swap files
Authored by: jlevitsk on May 20, '05 03:16:25PM

I agree. In my corporate image I enabled it by just appending ENCRYPTSWAP=-YES- to /etc/hostconfig



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10.4: Two hints related to swap files
Authored by: TriNeuro on May 20, '05 05:05:29PM

Uhm, everyone can read swap files?
Sample ls-output:
-rw------T 1 root wheel 67108864 May 18 23:27 swapfile0

That should mean read and write access only to the root-user. If you have an administrator account, you could sudo commands to read it. Nevertheless, one should be really interested before beginning to read through the swap file (and probably get a hold of an admin account, as no one with malicious intent should be in possess of such an account anyway).



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10.4: Two hints related to swap files
Authored by: osxpounder on May 20, '05 05:30:44PM

I'm wondering if those of you who've tried enabling this encryption have noticed performance issues. I'm setting up my first Mac mini for a really novice user, and I don't know how much to demand of the mini -- whether it's fast enough, overall, to handle the load of encrypting its swap file.

I can't really experiment with the little time I've got before I deliver the mini.

So, whether you've got a mini or not, I'd love to hear whether you've noticed performance hits due to encrypting your swap file.

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osxpounder



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10.4: Two hints related to swap files
Authored by: Spiken on May 20, '05 06:31:48PM

My computer simply get's all jammed up with encrypting on, it's not even something I'm thinking of. It takes a full 2 minutes to open an application like Apple Mail.



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10.4: Two hints related to swap files
Authored by: lolopb on May 20, '05 06:36:42PM

Strange, I enabled this since the beginning (and even before during beta tests) and it never happened, apps are still fast to launch, even Mail 2.

You may have another problem...



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10.4: Two hints related to swap files
Authored by: mayo2ca on May 21, '05 03:32:50PM

Is this on one of the older PowerBooks? They have 4200rpm drives, which may be quiet slow for this



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10.4: Two hints related to swap files
Authored by: macgruder on May 22, '05 11:51:45AM

I don't think it's true that all users can read the files. If your permission are correct the Swapfiles are owned by root:wheel and have 0600 permissions, so only root can do anything.



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