Research of RAM data remanence times
blog.3mdeb.com
blog.3mdeb.com
> The main goal is to determine the time required after powering off the platform for all the data to be irrecoverably lost from RAM.
Cold boot attack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack
Data remnance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence
Ironically, quantum computers have the opposite problem; coherence times for QC qubits are still less than a second: there is not yet a way to store qubits for even one second.
(2024: 291±6µs, 2022: 20µs)
"Cryogenically frozen RAM bypasses all disk encryption methods" (2008) https://www.zdnet.com/article/cryogenically-frozen-ram-bypas...
And that's part of why secure enclaves and TPM.
> If quantum information is never destroyed – and classical information is quantum information without the complex term i – perhaps our [RAM] states are already preserved in the universe; like reflections in water droplets in the quantum foam
According to the "Air gap malware" Wikipedia article's description of GSMem, the x86 RAM bus can be used as a low power 3G antenna. And, HDMI is an antenna, and, Ungrounded computers leak emanations to the ungrounded microphone port on the soundcard.
Air gap malware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-gap_malware
Stochastic forensics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_forensics
And there was an interesting feature - error rates didn't seem to change linearly with time, but (strongly for DDR4 and less so for DDR5) the error rate changes in intervals of 8 seconds. That's very much unexpected, so needs a good explanation or indicates a likely error in their procedure.
Still, it's nice to have at least some modern data; https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/h... is awesome and has much more extensive measurements, but machines from 2007 are somewhat less relevant today.