Re: cold boot attacks on cgd?

César Catrián Carreño <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.devel.crypto
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:02:59 +0000
"Steven M. Bellovin" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:49:18 -0300
> César Catrián Carreño <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Hi list.
> > 
> > According to this url, http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/ , a crypto
> > key can be retrieved from RAM after the computer is shutdown.
> > 
> > Is CGD vulnerable (storing the key on RAM), to this kind of attack?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> There is apparently some BIOS magic that can be done to force certain
> sections of RAM to be zeroed by the BIOS at boot time.  I don't know
> anything more about how to set that flag.  Even if it is set, there's
> no defense against someone chilling the RAM, removing it from your
> machine, and putting it into their own.
> 
> 		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb


Should the CGD's parameters file secure storage deal with this issue?


--
César Catrián Carreño
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