Re: the cold-boot attack - a paper tiger?

[email protected] wrote:
> What distinct string can I look for in these thousands of (text)files to identify key-material of loop-aes?
>
>   
I will not comment on the feasability of the attack, but provided that 
it works, I would go for the key
schedule. You have 10-14 consecutive round keys (160+ bytes) with equal 
probability
of 1 and 0 bits. Most memory does not have this statistical 
distribution. You can just scan the memory and
print all blocks with a statistical distribution of a key. It is likely 
that one of them is the key schedule.
The key schedule is not the key, but since it can be used for decryption 
of the data, it is

This may of cause provide some false positives, since there may be other 
things that produce random data, like
for example a ramdisk with an encrypted or compressed file on it, but it 
would reduce the possible keys considerably.
You can also just try all memory words, since it is feasable to test all 
of them as the key (or key schedule). A few billion
keys is not a big deal. It amounts to breaking a 32-bit key.

Otherwise I agree with your critic of the research group. Not releasing 
details about an attack is counter to
the philosophy of all open security research.

-Gisle

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