🚀 go-pugleaf

I haven't seen any serious discussion here or in the literature on
what I would term "side issues" of cryptography, those issues that
are important but not directly related to algorithmic consideration:

  1.  The hardware in use includes several caches such as instruction
      cache, data cache, and/or the disk controller has a cache.
      This seems to be common on 486-based PCs for example.  How
      can one "flush" the caches so there is no possibility of
      sensitive data left in them?  How does one read the cache
      so as to scrounge sensitive information?  Does flushing merely
      mark the contents as invalid (still allowing reading by
      diagnostic mode programs), or is there a way to forcefully
      zero out the cache contents?  I don't accept the power switch
      as an appropriate or fool-proof method.

  2.  Say I'm doing encryption/decryption on a workstation that is a
      "diskless" workstation, and in the process some pages get
      swapped over the ethernet, and a snooper captures the packets.
      How to avoid?  (e.g. use a local disk for swapping; or in 
      the program, lock down sensitive pages so no swapping occurs,
      if the OS will allow this)

  3.  The run-time library for the language in which the crypto program
      was written allocates output disk blocks, and fills them up to a
      point, terminating with (say) control-Z to indicate logical
      end-of-file, but leaving the rest of the last sector "dirty"
      which happens to contain sensitive data because the corresponding
      memory buffer had previously contained such data.

  4.  The program dynamically allocates storage, stores sensitive info,
      and deallocates storage without clearing it.  Or, the same can
      happen with static memory.

Are there any published (or unpublished!) guidelines or papers that address
these issues?  They seem critical to the overall functioning of a crypto
system, yet all I ever see are articles that concentrate merely on the
algorithms.

Jim Kirkpatrick     jimkirk@corral.uwyo.edu