public accounts / PGP / passphrases

[Rich Salz]

> >Could someone please elaborate on the foolishness of using PGP with a
> >passphrase on a public machine (as I do) ?  Am I wrong in thinking that my
> >secret key is useless to an intruder until she guesses my passphrase ?

The sys admin can change the kernel running on your machine.  A special
kernel can be built so that when a particular user is typing on a tty
and the executing process is named "pgp" then all keystrokes they type
are recorded into a file for the administrator to read later on.

The local machine must be part of the trusted computing base.
	/r$