encrypted RData file?

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
[mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Marc 
Schwartz (via MN)
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 2:56 PM
To: Roger D. Peng; Na Li
Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch; Duncan Temple Lang
Subject: Re: [R] encrypted RData file?

On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 16:15 -0500, Na Li wrote:

On 27 Oct 2005, Duncan Temple Lang wrote:

Yes, it is of interest and was sitting on my todo list at
some time.  If you want to go ahead and provide code to do it,
that would be terrific.  There are other areas where encryption
would be good to have, so a general mechanism would be nice.

D.

Na Li wrote:

Hi, I wonder if there is interest/intention to allow 

for encrypted .RData

files?  One can certainly do that outside R manually 

but that will leave a

decrypted RData file somewhere which one has to 

remember to delete.

I was hoping someone has already done it.  ;-(

One possibility is to implement an interface package to 

gpgme library which

itself is an interface to GnuPG.  

But I'm not sure how the input of passphrase can be handled 

without using

clear text.

Michael

Seems to me that a better option would be to encrypt the full 
partition
such that (unless you write the files to a non-encrypted partition)
these issues are transparent. This would include the use of save(),
save.image() and write() type functions to save what was an encrypted
dataset/object to a unencrypted file.

Of course, you would also have to encrypt the swap and tmp partitions
(as appropriate) for similar reasons.

On Linuxen/Unixen, full encryption of partitions is available via
loopback devices and other mechanisms and some distros have this
available as a built-in option. I believe that the FC folks 
finally have
this on their list of functional additions for FC5. Windows of course
can do something similar.

The other consideration here, is that if R Core builds in some form of
encryption, there is the potential for import/export restrictions on
such technology since R is available via international CRAN 
mirrors. It
may be best to provide for a plug-in "encryption black box" 
of sorts, so
that folks can use a particular encryption schema that meets various
legal/regulatory requirements.

Of course, simply encrypting the file or even a complete partition has
to be considered within a larger security strategy (ie. network
security, physical access control, etc.) that meets a particular
functional requirement (such as HIPAA here in the U.S.)

HTH,

Marc Schwartz