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A comment on Mac OS X Lion Login Passwords Extracted With Ease. Parent comment

Re:Mac OS X Lion Login Passwords Extracted With Ease by kevin_morrill on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @09:26AM (#2807171)
If this is reported correctly, it sounds like passwords are stored in memory for quite a while in their unhashed, clear text form. This is not good for people that depend on FileVault as a way to assume that physical access doesn't necessarily compromise their data.

It's a little hard to believe this as there's really no need to have the password kept in memory; it could be the exploit requires the device to be plugged in while you're typing your password--which is more believable and also less interesting.

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Re:Mac OS X Lion Login Passwords Extracted With Ease by Locke1689 on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @11:51AM (#2807892)
If you have full disc encryption enabled, you'll need to keep the encryption key in memory somewhere (encrypted or not). Basically, if an attacker gets hold of your running computer and you don't have serious hardware security then you're screwed.
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Re:Mac OS X Lion Login Passwords Extracted With Ease by sp332 on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @09:34AM (#2807205)
If you have the autologin feature enabled, which would you prefer: keep the password in RAM, where most people can't get it, or put it on the hard drive, which is a much easier target?
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Re:Mac OS X Lion Login Passwords Extracted With Ease by ovi256 on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @09:49AM (#2807275)
But why would the autologin implementation need access to the cleartext password ? And then why is the cleartext password stored at all ?

These seems like big holes.

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Re:Mac OS X Lion Login Passwords Extracted With Ease by epochwolf on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @12:15PM (#2808019)
On OSX, probably to unlock keychain.
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Re:Mac OS X Lion Login Passwords Extracted With Ease by Sidnicious on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @01:21PM (#2808424)
Yep: http://www.brock-family.org/gavin/perl/kcpassword.html
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Re:Mac OS X Lion Login Passwords Extracted With Ease by DmitrySumin on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @10:12AM (#2807380)
Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 do store clear-text passwords in memory, long after login.
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Re:Mac OS X Lion Login Passwords Extracted With Ease by eropple on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @10:25AM (#2807433)
It uses them, too. For convenience's sake (because everything else is locked under other passwords) I use the same usernames/passwords for my local machines, and without prompting me my new Mini was able to access SMB shares on other machines. I'm not terribly worried about it because this password is unique to local logins on my own network, but it was a little unnerving.
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