Today on ComputerWorld, Dan Rosenbaum wrote a rather interesting article regarding hard drive encrypted and ways that a study has used to get around it.
“…Princeton University computer security researcher Edward Felten released a study recently demonstrating that those keys are only as secure as the RAM that carries them, and that RAM is vulnerable in surprising ways. the upshot? Even turning a computer off may not be enough. “
Rather interesting to say the least!
Apparently the contents of RAM are not quite as volatile as previously thought. Through this group’s research they have figured out that even modern DRAM chips retain memory for up to a minute under normal circumstances, which in itself could be dangerous because encryption keys are stored there. What is more dangerous, however, is that if the RAM is ‘frozen’, or at least cooled a whole lot, it will hold the data for much longer, 10 minutes or more. And when they froze it in liquid nitrogen, it held it for even longer. How long? They aren’t sure how long it would hold it for, they ran out of liquid nitrogen first.
This has serious security implications for any computers that might be exposed to a physical hacker attempt. Previous you could use a nice encryption on that hard drive and have a reasonable expectation that even a fairly top notch hacker couldn’t get into it. Now, though, someone with the right tools who just nabbed your user-locked but still running laptop could potentially access everything on your hard drive by reading the memory for the key.
Length of key also doesn’t matter, the researchers said, unless we were dealing with keys 256k-1megabyte or more in size, which would be ridiculously large.
Its a rather interesting read to say the least. Check it out over at ComputerWorld.
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