cold boot attacks on disk encryption

Perry E. Metzger perry at piermont.com
Thu Feb 21 15:26:01 EST 2008


"Ali, Saqib" <docbook.xml at gmail.com> writes:
> However, the hardware based encryption solutions like (Seagate FDE)
> would easily deter this type of attacks, because in a Seagate FDE
> drive the decryption key never gets to the DRAM. The keys always
> remain in the Trusted ASIC on the drive.

I'm sure that the same sort of attacks used to get keying material out
of other ASICs and out of smart cards could be applied to the ASICs on
the drive controller board. No one has tried yet, of course, but I see
no reason they wouldn't succeed.

Perry

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