Begin forwarded message: From: Jacob Appelbaum Date: February 21, 2008 12:34:09 PM EST To: David Farber Subject: Cold Boot Attacks on Disk Encryption
Hi Dave, With all of the discussions that take place daily about laptop seizures, data breech laws and how crypto can often come to the rescue, I thought the readers of IP might be interested in a research project that was released today. We've been working on this for quite some time and are quite proud of the results. Ed Felten wrote about it on Freedom To Tinker this morning: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1257 "Today eight colleagues and I are releasing a significant new research result. We show that disk encryption, the standard approach to protecting sensitive data on laptops, can be defeated by relatively simple methods. We demonstrate our methods by using them to defeat three popular disk encryption products: BitLocker, which comes with Windows Vista; FileVault, which comes with MacOS X; and dm-crypt, which is used with Linux. The research team includes J. Alex Halderman, Seth D. Schoen, Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, William Paul, Joseph A. Calandrino, Ariel J. Feldman, Jacob Appelbaum, and Edward W. Felten." "Our site has links to the paper, an explanatory video, and other materials." "The root of the problem lies in an unexpected property of today's DRAM memories. DRAMs are the main memory chips used to store data while the system is running. Virtually everybody, including experts, will tell you that DRAM contents are lost when you turn off the power. But this isn't so. Our research shows that data in DRAM actually fades out gradually over a period of seconds to minutes, enabling an attacker to read the full contents of memory by cutting power and then rebooting into a malicious operating system." Our full paper with videos and photos can be found on the Princeton website: http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/ Regards, Jacob Appelbaum -=-=-=-=-=- Received: from localhost.localdomain (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by thorn.listbox.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3B0B44351 for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:28:47 -0500 (EST) Received: from localhost.localdomain (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by orion.listbox.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id A759D7000DA for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:26:02 -0500 (EST) Received: from chokecherry.srv.cs.cmu.edu (CHOKECHERRY.SRV.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.185.41]) by orion.listbox.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id ACA497000F3 for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:25:48 -0500 (EST) Received: from [10.0.1.200] (c-71-199-96-123.hsd1.pa.comcast.net [71.199.96.123]) (authenticated bits=0) by chokecherry.srv.cs.cmu.edu (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id m1LLPh5h029833 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=AES128-SHA bits=128 verify=NO) for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:25:48 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Errors-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Begin forwarded message: From: Declan McCullagh Date: February 21, 2008 3:57:43 PM EST To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Jacob Appelbaum Subject: Re: [IP] Cold Boot Attacks on Disk Encryption Dave, The paper published today makes some pretty strong claims about the vulnerabilities of Microsoft's BitLocker, Apple's FileVault, TrueCrypt, Linux's dm-crypt subsystem, and similar products. So I put the folks behind it to a test. I gave them my MacBook laptop with FileVault turned on, powered up, encrypted swap enabled, and the screen saver locked. They were in fact able to extract the 128-bit AES key; I've put screen snapshots of their FileVault bypass process here: http://www.news.com/2300-1029_3-6230933-1.html And my article with responses from Microsoft, Apple, and PGP is here: http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9876060-38.html Bottom line? This is a very nicely done attack. It's going to make us rethink how we handle laptops in sleep mode and servers that use encrypted filesystems (a mail server, for instance). -Declan
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