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A cold-boot attack as detailed in [0] makes it vastly easier to extract secrets from physical memory than to wiretap the AES process, especially if you're not i
by bri3d 15y ago
A cold-boot attack as detailed in [0] makes it vastly easier to extract secrets from physical memory than to wiretap the AES process, especially if you're not in possession of a privileged user account or a route into kernel space.
[0]: http://citpsite.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/oldsite-htdocs/pub/coldboot.pdf http://citpsite.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/oldsite-h...
- tptacek 15y agoI don't know how to respond to the argument that it's "vastly easier" to chill a bank of RAM with inverted compressed air cans or liquid nitrogen and then extract its entire contents than it is to just use a debugger to watch a program run. I guess "No, I don't agree." suffices.
- bri3d 15y agoWhen you don't have the privilege level to connect a debugger to the process or the secrets are in kernel space, it's probably easier to just reboot with a cold-boot kit attached via USB than to attempt some form of escalation exploit. Inverted air cans or liquid nitrogen are entirely unnecessary in most uses of a cold-boot attack - they're only a requirement if the machine has some form of boot protection and it's desired to transfer the memory modules for some sort of offline forensic analysis. As an additional plus, the tools which the authors of the linked paper have written for identifying key data in memory dumps are simpler to use than tracing the execution flow of even a simple application using a debugger. I'd probably use their approach even with full debug access, as obfuscating control flow around functions handling key data seems to be a more common practice than keeping said data obfuscated in memory.