cold boot attacks on disk encryption

[Jon Callas]

On Feb 21, 2008, at 12:14 PM, Ali, Saqib wrote:

> 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.

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.

	Jon

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com