[erlang-questions] How to exchange sensitive data with ports?

[Elena Garrulo]

An enlightening reading indeed... Thanks for your detailed replies.

I didn't state it, but I was looking for a "reasonable" level of
security, assuming that nobody had tampered with the system
previously. Kind of what you do when you enter your credit card number
into a web page: you trust your system to be clean of spyware...

BTW, I've realized that I was tackling the problem at a low level,
that is: wrapping calls to the smart card layer by means of an
external process. A better solution is to make the external process
have its own logic, make it deal with the sensitive data on its own
(safely handling memory), and send back to the erlang process the data
it needs.

Ciao a tutti (= cheers to everyone)


2009/8/7 Illo de' Illis <illo@REDACTED>:
> On 07/ago/2009, at 20.35, Hynek Vychodil <vychodil.hynek@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 6:57 PM, Illo de' Illis <illo@REDACTED> wrote:
>> I doubt your advices would be useful to the scenery the original poster is
>> working with. Since she was afraid of a pipe I guess she is already dealing
>> with an public/untrusted system, and I reckon locked memory (which I frankly
>> wouldn't call "security by obscurity") and /dev/TTY access for user input to
>> be a good starting point.
>>
>> If you are dealing with untrusted system there all effort just Potemkin's
>> village. It is worthless. One can make some masquerade for dumb people but
>> anyone who understand real security will laugh at you.
>
> It is all a matter of perspective.  I'd bet you would call a "masquerade for
> dumb people" locking someone's home door up to avoid thieves as well...
>
> Well, let's hope both our opinions will be of some use to Elena! Good luck
> for your smartcard project.
>
> Ciao,
> Illo.
>