Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Encrypt Your Disks
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Oops! According to a paper on cold-boot attacks that was delivered at the Usenix security conference, disk encryption, which many people consider the last word for protecting sensitive data on laptops, can be foiled fairly easily. The only good news is that a cold-boot attack requires physical access. Basically, the attacker cuts power to a machine that's in sleep mode, quickly restores the power and boots a malicious OS from a USB drive that copies the unencrypted data that is stored in the machine's RAM. Apparently, very few disk-encryption schemes protect against this type of attack. Find out more at CNET News.com.
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