2 ms·
It's something that's only triggered in the event of an unclean reboot so under normal circumstances it should be irrelevant and trying to be more elegant poten
by mjg59 2y ago
It's something that's only triggered in the event of an unclean reboot so under normal circumstances it should be irrelevant and trying to be more elegant potentially increases risk?
- arghwhat 2y agoThe inelegant approach increases risk by relying entirely on the OS being sure that the key is never recoverable from memory on clean shutdown, and on the firmware ensuring that all used RAM is sufficiently wiped in all unclean scenarios. What if Windows forgot to wipe a spot after having relocated a page? What happens if the firmware's boot flow is interrupted by, say, a hardware fault prompt, a low battery prompt, etc.? There's a lot of places where that approach can go wrong. The key approach is simpler and comparatively bullet proof: If the machine is rebooted, clean or not, the key will be lost and no memory that was previously used will be readable. All it takes is the OS initializing a single CPU feature on boot, with the only downside being that it requires support for a quite modern CPU feature.