Re: [PATCH] read --echo=[yes|no|wildcard]

[Isaac Dupree]

Robert Millan wrote:
> I think that it'd be better to just erase all our environment in
> grub_machine_fini() or a similar routine, than to give read specific knowledge
> that its data needs this kind of special protection.  Besides, it wouldn't be
> that simple since the data is controlled by the user via grub.cfg, not directly
> by GRUB.

I wonder if this erasing would take any significant amount of time (in 
which case there would be a reason not to implement that to happen all 
the time)

> Anyway, untill we support hashing this doesn't provide any additional security,
> since you can get the same from grub.cfg ;-)

fairly true, assuming nothing weird happens like grub.cfg being 
thoroughly deleted in the meantime :-)

anyway if a hash is used that takes (by design) around one second on the 
machine (e.g. sha256 repeated thousands? millions? of times), then I 
suppose the time taken to erase the memory used by GRUB would be trivial 
in comparison, assuming(rightly or wrongly) a good implementation...

-Isaac