Locking physical memory (RAM) under Windows (fwd)

Caskey L. Dickson caskey at technocage.com
Tue Nov 10 16:08:30 CET 1998


Here's an anouncement I just read.  It may be useful to anyone looking to
improve the windows version of gpg.

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    Heuer's Law: Any feature is a bug unless it can be turned off.
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Caskey <caskey*technocage.com>       ///                pager.818.698.2306
TechnoCage Inc.                     ///|               gpg: aiiieeeeeee!!!
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    Early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.


SCNSM 1.0 Beta, a non-swappable memory allocator for Windows 3.x/95/98, is
available and can be downloaded from

http://soundcode.com/content/download/products/scnsm/default.htm (docs)
http://soundcode.com/content/download/products/scnsm/scnsm10b.zip (source)

The SCNSM driver supports allocation of non-swappable memory on Windows
3.x/95/98. The principal design goal of SCNSM is to provide memory that will
not be swapped to disk, under any circumstances. Typically, security
applications require such memory to store private keys, passwords, and
sensitive intermediate results of cryptographic calculations.

SCNSM uses the same technique as allocating DMA buffers for hardware device
transfers.  The idea being that Windows doesn't swap DMA buffers and
therefore won't swap this buffer either.

The SCNSM source-code is copyrighted freeware.  The intent here is to end
the perennial nuisance of having sensitive security data swapped to disk
which undermines the public's confidence in commercial security products.
Please send any questions or bugs to me or support at soundcode.com.






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