Breaking VeraCrypt: Obtaining and Extracting On-the-Fly Encryption Keys

Speculating: if you have the key, you can make a read-only copy of the disk and analyze it on your own time without risk of altering it.

People buy VPS from linode/digitalocean/vultr or worse some solusvm based provider and believe such crytps give them a secure area

Agreed, the encrypted image has to be mounted and you have to admin/root access to capture the RAM contents.

This isn't what I would call "Breaking" Veracrypt.

The advantage isn't huge but it does exist. Stealing encryption keys out of memory is a reasonably common thing for more sophisticated malware to do, because if you can opportunistically do it once it generally confers permanent access to the encrypted data whenever you want.

Copying the contents out isn't very desirable because 1) it is slow and bandwidth intensive which means it is less likely to succeed opportunistically and more detectable, 2) you will not be able to examine the data again in the future (including changes) without finding an opportunity to copy it out again. It is also often just easier for someone with malicious intent to subtly capture the encrypted volume (can be sent out very slowly without worrying about user behavior) and then examine it remotely (easier and safer to use/iterate on custom tools when you're not shipping them to the compromised machine).

This way malware, especially like a plugin-based botnet, can continuously check for the key and grab it whenever it's in memory. Then later on, as convenient, plugins can search the encrypted volume for specific signatures whenever they want. That includes loading more signatures in the future, rescanning for changes, etc. All in all, the ability to extract the key from memory violates the fundamental assumption of the user that the data is not accessible when they have not mounted the volume... it means that if the volume has ever been mounted, unauthorized software might have captured the information necessary to examine it as desired, in a subtle way.

Elcomsoft is also principally a forensic vendor, and this kind of thing is very useful in forensics scenarios when you encounter a live machine (e.g. law enforcement seizure). If you can capture the key from the live machine quickly, you can do your analysis later at leisure and with less risk of contamination of the evidence. This minimizes the need for complex and risky methods like transporting the machine without power interruption.

Obviously this kind of problem is not necessarily completely solvable... if the data was decrypted then there was, at some point, the material to decrypt it present on the system. But more modern disk and file encryption solutions tend to use various solutions like the TPM and operating system features to avoid the key being available in memory.

Finally, as always, password reuse is an issue here. If you can get the key material there's a good bet it might work on other volumes as well if you can recompute for whatever the volume salt is... this may be more or less practical depending on how TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt derives the key which I don't remember well.

That doesn't prevent extraction by someone with supervisor/hypervisor access (so if Elcomsoft can't extract it it's only because they are lazy), it just tries to make it less likely that an attacker can extract it from a locked machine they have physical access to (by rebooting into a boot image of their choice and reading the RAM, the so-called "cold boot" attack).

It's mathematically impossible to prevent key extraction unless you put the key in an HSM (the TPM might function as such, but it may not have good performance) and use that for decryption (the most you can do is make the key larger up to the amount of RAM you have, at the costing of wasting RAM).

Even if you use an HSM, the malware can just extract the data itself or even on-the-fly decrypt the disk with the HSM and re-encrypt with a known key and then exfiltrate the known key, so all this does is make the attack slower since you need to read/write the whole disk.

This is just a software limitation, you can't turn the option on and trust that they can't work around it next month. As the article says, RAM encryption is obfuscation more than really doing anything. It would be rather impressive if you could encrypt the key necessary to decrypt your RAM yet continue to use the computer.

That isn't to say RAM encryption doesn't have other benefits, but if your computer is unlocked and unattended, then yeah someone is going to be able to dump those keys one way or another especially if the system isn't tamper-safe (like a smart card aims to be).

"Keep Receiving our News" seems to do nothing when clicked (no browser-level modal) so that has to be the worst-labeled "No" button on any website.

Yeah hugely annoying. Thank $deity for uBlock Origin -> Element Zapper Mode FTW.

That is just one of many annoyances that are a total non-issue if you have JS off by default, and of which I am painfully reminded whenever I see or need to use someone else's computer.

What does "as paranoid as turning your back to a camera and the eyes reading very primitive algorithm will shut down your PC" mean?

Note that this is just a software limitation, you can't turn it on and trust that they can't break it next month. As the article quotes, it's more obfuscation (that they haven't yet worked around, apparently) than doing anything. It would be rather impressive if you could encrypt the key necessary to decrypt your RAM yet continue to use the computer, i.e. this will always be just obfuscation.