Advanced Search

Log In | Not a Member? Contact ADC

Security Implications of Paging

Paging has long been a major problem for security-conscious programmers. If you are writing a program that does encryption, the existence of even a small portion of the cleartext of a document in a backing store could be enough to reduce the complexity of breaking that encryption by orders of magnitude.

Indeed, many types of data, such as hashes, unencrypted versions of sensitive data, and authentication tokens, should generally not be written to disk due to the potential for abuse. This raises an interesting problem. There is no good way to deal with this in user space (unless a program is running as root). However, for kernel code, it is possible to prevent pages from being written out to a backing store. This process is referred to as “wiring down” memory, and is described further in “Memory Mapping and Block Copying”.

The primary purpose of wired memory is to allow DMA-based I/O. Since hardware DMA controllers generally do not understand virtual addressing, information used in I/O must be physically in memory at a particular location and must not move until the I/O operation is complete. This mechanism can also be used to prevent sensitive data from being written to a backing store.

Because wired memory can never be paged out (until it is unwired), wiring large amounts of memory has drastic performance repercussions, particularly on systems with small amounts of memory. For this reason, you should take care not to wire down memory indiscriminately and only wire down memory if you have a very good reason to do so.

In Mac OS X, memory may be wired down at the time of allocation. In I/O Kit, you specify IOMalloc and IOFree to allocate wired memory. In Mach, kmem_alloc_wired (and kmem_free) can be used. It may also be wired down after allocation. For more information on wired memory, see “Memory Mapping and Block Copying”.

Did this document help you? Yes: Tell us what works for you. It’s good, but: Report typos, inaccuracies, and so forth. It wasn’t helpful: Tell us what would have helped.

	Get information on Apple products. Visit the Apple Store online or at retail locations. 1-800-MY-APPLE Copyright © 2007 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. | Terms of use | Privacy Notice