4 ms·
It certainly makes sense from a security standpoint, but is there any additional overhead to encrypting swap? This is the first time I've ever seen it mentioned
by SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
It certainly makes sense from a security standpoint, but is there any additional overhead to encrypting swap? This is the first time I've ever seen it mentioned as a security measure.
- Skunkleton 11y agoIn theory anything could be in ram could also end up in swap. So yes, it is important. And yes, there is overhead, but it isn't too bad if your system isn't RAM constrained, and your CPU supports AES-NI or similar.
- ams6110 11y agoModern systems have enough ram that swap is not much used. If it becomes necessary, the overhead of encrypting will be the least of your concerns. If your system is swapping, it's crawling anyway.
- yellowapple 11y agoIdeally, you wouldn't even have a dedicated swap partition. No data is always more secure than even the most perfectly-encrypted data. If you do have swap, though, then the encryption probably won't matter much compared to the fact that your machine is swapping in the first place.
- vonuebelgarten 11y agoHibernation is a very nice feature (I use it for laptop and desktop machines) and it requires a swap partition. Also, a encrypted swap is even more important in this scenario. In the laptop I'm typing this, swap is one of the partions over a LVM2 physical volume over LUKS.
- yellowapple 11y agoThat's why I sad "ideally" :)