> On Wednesday, August 31, 2016 at 10:40:23 AM UTC-7, grzegorz....@gmail.com > wrote: > >> An actual protection would be some kind of a chemical that would destroy >> the ram chips if they ever reach certain (lower than room) temperature. > > the epoxy is likely to damage them in most means of removal.
I guess most people have shinier (literally, on the contacts) new hardware than I do, but I know now and then I need to re-seat my RAM chips when the system gets cranky. Epoxy would a pretty costly measure (probably destroying the motherboard as well as the RAM). I guess I'd have to get a shinier new mobo in that case. :) I think case security and case (and room) intrusion detection is a bit more "civilized." > i know of things that can do their damage when they reach a certain > temperature or higher. never heard of one set off by going below a certain > temp. While interesting, that seems like a bad idea. Unless you're UPS'd up and never need to modify your hardware, insert/remove a card, whatever, you're gonna have a bad day eventually and lose your ram/mobo. > erasing on power loss would be good too, esp if the attacker doesnt know > about it. This, I do like, possibly hooked into case intrusion. I might just look into that myself, see if there's certain RAM pins that can be safely grounded to wipe the RAM in a case of power outage. I expect it's more difficult than that, and that the RAM would have to be actively wiped, since a power-off should basically be more or less equivalent to grounding all the RAM pins, no? Now, frying the memory with a high voltage zip from a charged up cap, say, on some chip-enable line or whatever, if there is a case intrusion without the proper trick done to disable it (such as a 16-dip-switch combination lock that has to be set properly) might be kind of cool. :) You'd want some gate to isolate that line (or thew whole chip) from the motherboard, to protect it. Maybe a capsule of acid on the ram chips (and contained to only affect them) that gets popped on command. It'd be fun to burn the sticky fingers of any intruder, too. :) Getting a bit fanciful here... On that same line of thought, sending 120V to the case if it's opened while the power is on (which is the mode of action for a cold boot attack, I assume?) might be fun. You might want to remove your Underwriter's Lab logo from the PC if you rig that up, lol. Getting into "Home Alone" territory. If you keep your PC on when you're away from it (which I think is safer, and I guess is the situation when you need protection from a cold boot attack), you could do something like immediately start wiping the RAM upon case intrusion. That'd be harmless in the case of legitimate maintenance, too. Seems much cleaner. I wonder what the most straight forward method of stopping all multi-tasking and starting to wipe the ram would be. Could a dom0 bash script, watching an intrusion detection device, simply do an "xl pause" or whatever on all VM's and start writing to some /proc memory device? (That's probably not going to work, you'd need something more ring-zero-ey...? Perhaps in a device driver. When I try to use my on-board NVidia, it does a good job of locking up the computer and wiping the RAM itself, after awhile, lol.) It'd have to be reasonably fast at starting its work. And writing to 4g/8g of memory is going to take some time, in the best case. Which adds points in the favour of the more destructive high-voltage zap method. (Maybe not a sequential write, but a bit more randomized one would thwart any attacker better?) There may be some existing work done on this for xen; I might do a bit of research and report back if I find anything useful. Interesting subjects to ponder. In my case (pun intended), there's not anything sensitive or incriminating on my drive or in memory; it's more a matter of protecting privacy and attempting to stop ongoing harassment and illegal surveillance. Stealing some work designs or code or personal information would be annoying, but it wouldn't jeopardize my life, land me in jail, or have me detained for waterboarded or anything. So knowing someone was tampering is good enough for me, and what I have personally focused upon. I'd be interested in others' thoughts on leaving the PC on versus leaving it off. Lately, I've been leaving it on, but with an alternative OS (another Linux) whose sole purpose is to know if somebody's been mucking around. My actual useful drive, data, passwords, go with me. It's only slightly inconvenient, but so far it has been the quickest route towards some peace of mind until I'm 100% confident in physical security and tamper detection. Sorry for any digression. 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