Hardware Geeks

Princeton University has demonstrated an easy way hackers can access even the most well-protected computers sensitive information.

What did they do? They simply froze the memory and booted up the system using a program that copies the contents of the memory. According to researches at Princeton, Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) retains data for up to a few hours if they are frozen. Normally data stored on memory is lost with in seconds of a system being shut off.

“These risks imply that disk encryption on laptops may do less good than widely believed,” according to the report, which was published this week by researchers from Princeton, the Electronic Frontier Foundation digital rights group, and Wind River Systems software company. “Ultimately, it might become necessary to treat DRAM as untrusted, and to avoid storing sensitive confidential data there, but this will not be feasible until architectures are changed to give software a safe place to keep its keys.”

Researches and National security agencies have known since the 1970’s that DRAM stores information longer when they have been cooled.

Post Tags: ddram  laptops  hackers  notebooks  security  memory 

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