Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys.

[swestrup]

Here's an educational little video that shows you how to easily break most whole-disk encryption products. I can imagine ways to prevent these methods, but they are far from trivial, as they would probably require careful cache control, and assembly-level routines for key management.

As an aside, I should mention that sps and I discussed the potential uses of slow DRAM decay many years ago, but in the context of the possibility of making viruses that would live entirely in RAM, but could survive reboot.

I never thought of this particular application though.