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Comment by keyme | Hacker News Reader

Not really... I've seen a demonstration where a Truecrypt (or something similar) encrypted laptop is stolen. The machine is locked, but still powered on (very reasonable. You locked your machine and left your desk). This basically means that the AES key is in RAM.

The attacker/thief cools down the RAM with liquid nitrogen (to slow the discharge), inserts a bootable CD with a special tool to dump physical RAM on bootup, and quickly cycles the laptop battery (causing a cold boot).

Since the RAM is not zeroed on bootup, the "old" bits stay pretty much as they were (thanks to the cooling).

IIRC this allowed an attacker recovery of the key with a very high probability of success.

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If this is a concern, the solution is easy. Buy an SSD, turn computer off when you walk away, turn computer on when you come back.

The intersection of people vulnerable to cold boot attacks and people likely to be victims of cold boot attacks is hopefully the empty set.

While everything you say is true, it would seem paranoid in many cases. I don't know how many neighborhood electronics fencers have liquid nitrogen laying around or the computer savvy to pull this kind of stuff.

If someone is after me who is using this methodology then I have seriously pissed off the wrong people. While you could argue that it's only paranoia if the object of preparation is not possible, I would say that you're at least one leg over the fence into paranoia-land if you're prepping against a cold-boot and don't have any nation state or corporate espionage level enemies.

Corporate espionage isn't exactly rare, and it can affect any employee (usually the least important employees, since they tend to be the least careful).

LN2 is cheap. If undergrads can make LN2 ice cream, they can use it for cracking too.

One of the nice things about OSX and Filevault2 is that you can force the key to be destroyed on suspend:

     destroyfvkeyonstandby - Destroy File Vault Key when going
     to standby mode. By default File vault keys are retained
     even when system goes to standby. If the keys are
     destroyed, user will be prompted to enter the password 
    while coming out of standby mode.(value: 1 - Destroy, 0 -
     Retain)

One of the other nice things about OSX is the feds may already have your key[0], so if you manage to get your computer back from them after that confiscate it, it won't have cracks in it from the extreme cold.

[0]http://www.nosuchcon.org/talks/D1_02_Alex_Ninjas_and_Harry_P...

SMCs are present in nearly all Intel systems...They could very well store your truecrypt keys too

SMCs are not the problem. The problem is code in OSX could put your key there in a way that someone could dump it.

Of course, since FileVault is not open source, we have no way of knowing if it does this. Is this paranoid? Perhaps, but if you are worried about cold boot attacks you should be worried about this as well.

You might also be worried about some strange design decisions in FileVault such as the fact that it uses public key cryptography[0] for what ought to just be symmetric disk encryption. While not a red flag,it is a bit strange.

[0]http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/FeedEnclosure/u...

The trust you have in proprietary software is charming.

It doesn't actually require LN2. In fact, all you really need for many cases is a can of compressed air and a usb drive.

The idea that your full disk encryption is only safe so long as nobody manages to have such outlandishly difficult to acquire materials is rather disheartening.

Moreover, disk encryption systems aren't just designed for overly paranoid individuals who probably don't have anything more interesting on their drive than embarrassing porn, it's also targeted for people who have data they seriously want to keep from being divulged. A perfect example being a running, but locked, corporate laptop being stolen from an office building or even a public space (e.g. a coffee shop). Someone desiring to commit industrial espionage would have no difficulties whatsoever in pulling off a cold boot attack on a vulnerable system, even if liquid nitrogen was required (it's quite easy to obtain and fairly cheap).

While the materials required are quite simple to get I am more worried about someone jacking my macbook pro and wiping the drive and reselling it as opposed to someone doing a cold boot on it. The materials are cheap, the execution of the attack isn't terrifically complicated for the folks on here, but the likelihood of being a victim of this attack in the wild is exceedingly low, that's what I was getting at moreso than the difficulty of the attack.

Obviously it is not neighborhood electronics fencers we're addressing here.

You don't actually even need to use liquid nitrogen. Much more common is chemical duster (hold the can upside-down and the boiling fluorocarbons will rapidly cool anything), or even nothing at all if you do it quickly. There are entire USB distributions dedicated to this sort of thing, and it has been done plenty of times outside of academic or professional settings. For example: http://revision3.com/hak5/coldbootattack

Reminds me of old home computers, where the RAM was slow enough to discharge that you didn't need to bother to cool down anything: Flicking the power quickly enough on a C64 would often leave most of the memory intact.

That was probably because of a capacitor somewhere in the power supply though..., right?

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