cold boot attacks on disk encryption

[Steven M. Bellovin]

On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:37:20 -0800
"Ali, Saqib" <docbook.xml at gmail.com> wrote:

> >  Umm, pardon my bluntness, but what do you think the FDE stores the
> > key in, if not DRAM? The encrypting device controller is a computer
> > system with a CPU and memory. I can easily imagine what you'd need
> > to build to do this to a disk drive. This attack works on anything
> > that has RAM.
> 
> How about TPM? Would this type of attack work on a tamper-resistant
> ver1.2 TPM?

See
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/d2ff5c4e-4a68-4fd3-81d1-665e95a59dd91033.mspx?mfr=true

Briefly, there's a bit in the TPM that means "there are keys present;
zero RAM when booting".  This does nothing against the guy with the
Dewar flask of liquid nitrogen, of course.


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

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