Suggestion: Leaky temp directory with encrypted home directories

[Ansgar Burchardt]

Hi,

Dustin Kirkland <kirkland at canonical.com> writes:

> However, it's worth mentioning that /tmp is wiped on every boot in
> Ubuntu.  For this reason, I usually put my /tmp in a tmpfs in memory
> (on systems where I have a few GB of memory).  Add this line to your
> /etc/fstab:
>   tmpfs /tmp tmpfs rw
>
> This ensures that the data written to /tmp is never actually written
> to disk.  I think this is an excellent best-practice for the security
> conscious.

This is not always true.  Contents of a tmpfs can be swapped to disk[1]
and you might thus leak information when you rely on the fact that
contents of a tmpfs will never be written to permanent storage.

Regards,
Ansgar

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmpfs#Linux>