Os x vm sleepimage
I didn't test every single app I have installed so it's possible there may be others that aren't safe to use but in general, it appears that Apple's software is not an issue. That virtual machine's password showed up twice in plain text, so if you use VMWare, that may be a cause for concern although it didn't show up alongside any other strings which would identify it as a password so without knowing what it was already I doubt if anyone but an experienced hacker could fish it out.
The only time I was able to see a password show up in the sleepimage file was after running VMWare and logging into my Vista vm. bash_history file which contain your password.) (Note that if you want to try all this yourself, once you're done you'll need to exit your Terminal session, start a new one, and then edit out the entries in your. I did extensive testing and a sudo grep -a password /var/vm/sleepimage (the strings command won't run on a 4GB file) yielded nothing, even after changing my user password, logging out, logging in, restarting and updating the sleepimage file after every secure access in each app. When you put your computer to sleep it, should happen in under five seconds my MacBook now goes to sleep in two seconds.Īs far as I can determine, in 10.5.7, neither the OS, the Finder, Safari, Mail, Remote Desktop, Directory Utility, Terminal, nor Keychain Access store any passwords in RAM in a way that shows up as plain text in the sleepimage file. Now go delete the file /private var vm sleepimage" to free up some hard drive space.
To disable safe sleep, run the two following commands in Terminal: $ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0$ sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=falseWhen done, restart your computer. Also, this sleepimage file is the same size of your total RAM, wasting valuable hard drive space. The problem with this is putting your computer to sleep can take a while (20 seconds to one minute or more), depending on how much data you currently have loaded in RAM. If your system loses power completely, it can recover the contents of RAM from this sleepimage file. What happens is that when you put your computer to sleep, the system writes the contents of RAM into the file /private var vm sleepimage, then goes into normal sleep mode.
OS X VM SLEEPIMAGE PORTABLE
Newer portable Macs use safe sleep (hibernation) in combination with normal sleep (older computers can use this, too).