Minimizing lifetime of sensitive data in concurrent programs

Abstract

The prolonged lifetime of sensitive data (such as passwords) in applications gives rise to several security risks. A promising approach is to erase sensitive data in an "eager fashion", i.e., as soon as its use is no longer required in the application. This approach of minimizing the lifetime of sensitive data has been applied to sequential programs. In this short paper, we present an extension of the this approach to concurrent programs where the interleaving of threads makes such eager erasures a challenging research problem.