cold boot attacks on disk encryption

[The Fungi]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 05:09:29AM +1300, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> 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).
[...]

Saw an interesting free software example of this the other day (not
for Windows, of course) using loss of signal from a particular
bluetooth device (mobile phone, et cetera) to lock your machine or
run other designated commands:

   http://sourceforge.net/projects/blueproximity/

It also supports *unlocking* on approach, but that's a bad idea
unless they can start providing a client to run on the "token"
device (maybe using asymmetric key crypto to sign and verify a
challenge string instead of just looking for the device's BT
address).
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