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Wow, is a terminal emulator expected to write content to your /tmp? Security! > It turns out the VTE library actually writes the scrollback buffer to disk, a
by s_gourichon 8y ago
Wow, is a terminal emulator expected to write content to your /tmp? Security!
> It turns out the VTE library actually writes the scrollback buffer to disk, a "feature" that was noticed back in 2010 and that is still present in modern implementations. At least the file contents are now encrypted with AES256 GCM since 0.39.2, but this raises the question of what's so special about the VTE library that it requires such an exotic approach.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664611#c48 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664611#c48 seems to clarify. This affects all vte-based terminal emulators, but only when setup to unlimited scrollback.
See https://lwn.net/Articles/752924/ https://lwn.net/Articles/752924/ for a quick test I made which seems to confirm that in the limited scrollback case, nothing is written to disk.