Simon Says – Musings of a Technology CTO

Following my recent post on FireWire Attacks, I thought I’d follow up on that other classic Full Disk Encryption exploit, The “Cold Boot Attack”.

Back in February 2008 a group of clever Princeton students published their infamous paper “Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys“. Though the retention of data in RAM chips has been known since their invention, and certainly since at least 1978, The “Princeton Paper” reminded us that when you turn a computer off, it does not mean all the data from memory is instantly gone, and of course, if something important remained, like an encryption key, then your computer security might be vulnerable. Read more…