isn't a realistic attack in his threat model Under different circumstances your solution would be 100% correct, however, in this situation we are worried about

isn't a realistic attack in his threat model Under different circumstances your solution would be 100% correct, however, in this situation we are worried about "everyday" type criminals. These are the guys/girls that find a laptop in an unlocked locker and snatch it; small window of opportunity. In your analogy the description of the criminals is much more sophisticated; Oceans 11 types. Stealing RAM can potentially tip someone off to a threat, a better solution IMO is the Stone-Cold Bootkit[1]. The bootkit can hook into Windows in order to gain unrestricted access. It does this by writing to the MBR unrestricted; haven't we seen this before[2]? Once installed it will log your decryption password and do what ever with it. A BIOS password(windows) and HHD encryption will be enough to keep the NSA out for a while, and a normal criminal out indefinitely. It would be nice to have a mobo with some type of secure memory encryption programs could write to- digitally signed. Of course that could be owned too, but it's a start. In the words of Bruce Schneier, "[sic] it is very difficult to secure data when the attacker has physical control of the machine the data is stored on."[3] Now I am thinking about the /boot partition in linux; where GRUB is stored. [1] http://www.stoned-vienna.com/ http://www.stoned-vienna.com/ [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643451 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643451 [3] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/cold_boot_attac.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/cold_boot_atta... [4] PSA: http://zedomax.com/blog/2009/02/23/linux-boot-hack-how-to-password-protect-grub/ http://zedomax.com/blog/2009/02/23/linux-boot-hack-how-to-pa...