data leakage

["Marvin Lyndon" <marvin.lyndon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

I have often heard arguments against only encrypting the partition(s) 
containing sensitive data: "data will leak", people tell me, hence you 
should really be encrypting the entire system.

I would like to know how exactly it is that "data leaks". Swap is an obvious 
suspect; but suppose you just use a chunk of RAM as a swap device 
[http://kerneltrap.org/node/3660]. Similarly, /tmp is mounted as a ramfs. 
Given such a setup, is there any reason to fear data leakage to sectors 
outside the encrypted partition?

Thanks for any hints,

Marvin

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Linux-crypto:  cryptography in and on the Linux system
Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/