[Leaplist] Fwd: Cold Boot Attacks on Disk Encryption

[Chris]

>"The root of the problem lies in an unexpected property of today’s DRAM
>memories. DRAMs are the main memory chips used to store data while the
>system is running. Virtually everybody, including experts, will tell you
>that DRAM contents are lost when you turn off the power. But this isn’t
>so. Our research shows that data in DRAM actually fades out gradually
>over a period of seconds to minutes, enabling an attacker to read the
>full contents of memory by cutting power and then rebooting into a
>malicious operating system."
>  
>
Today's DRAM? Nah. About two centuries ago, we used to debug
machine language routines using the area of memory reserved
on the Commodore CBM machines for the cassette tape buffer.
The main DRAM area was actually cleared on power-on by a
startup routine - but it didn't touch the area reserved for the tape
buffer. So if we did something stupid, and got into a hard loop,
we could just power-cycle the box, and our code would still be
where we left it. If this property was "unexpected" - well, they
must be pretty new to the business.

Cheers,

Chris