gnome-keyring-daemon: insufficient process capabilities, unsecure memory might get used I would like to manage my ssh passwork with gnome-keyring. I am on Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS, gnome3. I don't have root access to the system. The question is in the title indeed: gnome-keyring-daemon: insufficient process capabilities, unsecure memory might get used This worries me. What does it mean?

Since you are not root on system, the process calling gnome-keyring-daemon does not have the privileges to prevent a possible write of the sensitive cryptographic key data to the system's hard disk.

What happens is that the gkd process does not have the ability to perform a CAP_IPC_LOCK to lock memory. If your filesystem supports capabilities, you can give the executable this capability with this terminal command:


sudo setcap cap_ipc_lock=+ep `which gnome-keyring-daemon`


Without this capability the key storage memory can not be locked, there is a chance the memory might swap out and be written to the hard disk, where it could be read by someone with either root access on the machine or physical access to the hard disk the memory swapped to.

Here is the source code of the file that generates that warning: <

More information about memory locking: <