Re: the cold-boot attack

Mr. Applebaum:

Are you now suggesting that loop-aes has now been subverted in some manner?


V/R,

Stuart


Quoting Jacob Appelbaum <[email protected]>:

> Boyd Waters wrote:
> > On Feb 21, 2008, at 12:17 PM, a co-worker wrote:
> >
> >> Research at Princeton demonstrated that it is possible to recover
> >> significant information from mounted FileVault, i.e. a stolen
> >> sleeping laptop, using a cold reboot technique.
> >>
> >> from: <http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/>
> >
> >
> > I really like the part about cooling the RAM to -50C with a can of
> > compressed air. Keeps the bits from rotting.
>
> Thanks! We thought it was a cute attack as well!
>
> Cooling the RAM isn't strictly required. Some of our most fun proof of
> concept attacks don't require anything more than a reboot.
>
> >
> > No one has mentioned loop-aes, for Linux, which twiddles the bits of the
> > key (in RAM) periodically (XOR with a known string of random bits,
> > generated at boot-time) - so it moves the key around in memory, and
> > flips the ones and zeroes back and forth. I think that would complicate
> > the attack mentioned in the paper.
> >
>
> We did run our attacks on loop-aes and we did find keying material. We
> actually found a very large amount of keying material. We didn't bother
> to implement a decryption utility with the keys found it memory, it
> would be trivial to do so though.
>
> Regards,
> Jacob Appelbaum
>
>
> -
> Linux-crypto:  cryptography in and on the Linux system
> Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/
>
>


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-
Linux-crypto:  cryptography in and on the Linux system
Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/