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Old 8th June 2009
Mr-Biscuit Mr-Biscuit is offline
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Default Reading paging files.

I noticed during mounting the NTFS partition on the laptop that the Windows paging file could be read with vi or any text editor. This made me wonder,"Can a Linux or BSD swap partition or swap file be read in the same manner? Can swap be read while it is active?"
I am asking these questions in regard to security .
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Old 8th June 2009
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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OpenBSD has had an encrypted swap system by default for more than four years, and had it as an option since 1999. I can't speak for other OSes.
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Old 8th June 2009
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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All 3 of the major BSD's supported encrypted swap partitions/files, this should prevent anyone from gleaming any useful information from them.. even unencrypted it would look a lot like garbage, random 4K pages in unpredictable locations.

I know for a fact that this is done by default on OpenBSD, I do not know if that can be said for the other BSD projects.. someone else here can answer that for you.

Reading from the swap file/partition is possible as root, permissions do allow it.

Briefly searching Google, I found several hits for encrypted swap/page files in Windows.. you might need 3rd party support for it though.

Hope that helps..
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Old 8th June 2009
Mr-Biscuit Mr-Biscuit is offline
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I found the solution for Linux at least with the testdisk/photrec suite. I want to see if any traces of any activity are left over.
It's a start.
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Old 8th June 2009
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FreeBSD doesn't encrypt SWAP by default, and I assume nether does NetBSD. Setting it up on FreeBSD however takes only a few minutes.

Obviously if it is on disk, you can access it in some way: the big question is can you figure out whats on it when you do 8=)
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Old 8th June 2009
Mr-Biscuit Mr-Biscuit is offline
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A while back, I'd use scite to read hex and other file types.
What will I do with it? See how secure my box is, check for missing files, the usual.
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