On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 2:03 AM, Kyle Sluder <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 8:07 PM, Chris Suter <[email protected]> wrote: >> What am I missing? > > If the attacker physically powers off the machine while the page is > written out to disk, s/he can just read the page off the swap space on > the HDD. If this page contains, say, an initialization vector, then > bang you're dead.
The same is actually true of RAM. You can reboot the machine and RAM contents are largely preserved, ready to be read by your code. You can even yank the RAM out of a machine, plug it into another one, and read the contents. This works because RAM takes some time (on the order of 30 seconds?) to fully decay after the power is pulled. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack Mike _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [email protected]
