Security issue in Terminal

[Auke Kok]

On 03/07/2012 02:49 PM, Guido Berhoerster wrote:
> * Brian Waters<brianmwaters at gmail.com>  [2012-03-07 19:49]:
>> Whether or not it's a security issue generally is definitely
>> debatable. For certain users, though, it's definitely an issue and I
>> hope they would switch to xterm or something similar for the time
>> being.
>
> Switching to xterm will not gain you any additional security as
> the scrollback memory can be swapped out and thus end up on disk,

vte or Terminal could potentially call mlock() on the scrollback buffer 
pages, causing them to be never swapped out. You'd run into 
RLIMIT_MEMLOCK, which defaults to 64k (per process), but it might be 
sufficient for those folks that care.

Note that this doesn't protect against physical access either, liquid 
nitrogen/cold boot attacks still can bypass this protection at any time.

Auke