Re: disabling Intel PSN

Olaf Titz (olaf@bigred.inka.de)
Fri, 17 Dec 1999 01:14:36 +0100

> Some of us USE the PSN for good and not evil. I hacked ssh to append
> the PSN of all cpus in my system in ascending order to my passphrase.
> That's an extra 24 bytes of passphrase that I don't have to type but
> still keeps me feeling that much more secure. If my passphrase is
> somehow compromised, I'm ok unless someone has physical access to my
> machine.

Or network access to your account, in that case. Reading the PSN
doesn't require physical access (unless you dig deeper in the kernel
to require a process to own the console for that, not sure if this is
possible).

What you describe is roughly equivalent to storing the 24 extra bytes
in a local file or in a hacked copy of the ssh program itself.

Olaf

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