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Message-ID: <a291cce3ff1ba978e7ad231a8e1b7d82f6164e86.camel@perches.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm: Add kvfree_sensitive() for freeing sensitive data
 objects
From:   Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
To:     Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>,
        Jarkko Sakkinen <jarkko.sakkinen@linux.intel.com>,
        James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>,
        "Serge E. Hallyn" <serge@hallyn.com>
Cc:     linux-mm@kvack.org, keyrings@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date:   Mon, 06 Apr 2020 08:45:18 -0700
In-Reply-To: <20200406023700.1367-1-longman@redhat.com>
References: <20200406023700.1367-1-longman@redhat.com>
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On Sun, 2020-04-05 at 22:37 -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
> For kvmalloc'ed data object that contains sensitive information like
> cryptographic key, we need to make sure that the buffer is always
> cleared before freeing it. Using memset() alone for buffer clearing may
> not provide certainty as the compiler may compile it away. To be sure,
> the special memzero_explicit() has to be used.
> 
> This patch introduces a new kvfree_sensitive() for freeing those
> sensitive data objects allocated by kvmalloc(). The relevnat places
> where kvfree_sensitive() can be used are modified to use it.

Why isn't this called kvzfree like the existing kzfree?