cold boot attacks on disk encryption

[Peter Gutmann]

"Leichter, Jerry" <leichter_jerrold at emc.com> writes:

>I seem to recall some (IBM?) research in which you wore a ring with an RFID-
>like chip in it.  Move away from your machine for more than some preset time
>and it locks.  I'm sure we'll see many similar ideas come into use.

There were commercial products that did this available some years ago, they
hooked into the Windows auth using a custom GINA DLL (GINA = the Windows
extensible login/authentication mechanism, think PAM for Windows) and locked
the machine when you moved away from it.  They failed in the marketplace,
there was no interest in them from users (or at least several of them failed,
some may still be around).  I was given a bunch of the tags some years ago
when one vendor discontinued them, but from memory the drivers were from the
NT4 era and there was no chance they were going to be updated further so I
never did anything with them.  I wasn't able to find out any more details
about their failure in the marketplace beyond "no-one bought them".

There have even been DIY articles on this published, e.g.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1944631,00.asp from ExtremeTech.

Peter.

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