ramrecovery
Security and privacy
cold boot attack demo
SHOW HN2024
How HN took it
0 positive, 6 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 4 critical, out of 10 comments about the project. Thread score -0.30.
Performance: 0 for, 2 againstIdea: 0 for, 1 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Nice work on the demo
From 1 comment
Nice work. There is TME for intel, does anyone know its implementation state and if something similar exists for arm?…
badrabbit on HN
Objections
One bit flip does not necessarily make a recovered key useless, so the risk is debated
From 2 comments
It's nice to recover an image but encryption keys are not that. One bit flip and it's game over. This experiment is more useful for human-readable document forensics than…
oskarw85 on HNThere is extensive research on key finding attacks. Often they only need 30% of the bits. Things can be sped up by exploiting entropy - keys are really random, unlike most of the…
ivancho on HN
0.75 seconds of residual power seems too long for RAM without refresh
From 2 comments
It is important to note they could access an image in the memory up to 0.75 seconds after cutting power, but after 1.0 seconds everything had completely decayed. This sounds less…
Cheer2171 on HN0.75 seconds without cooling. I would not expect "residual power" to last for 0.75 seconds. Even if it did, RAM has to actively be refreshed by the memory controller. (DDR…
NavinF on HN
Requests
Test different delays and ambient temperatures
From 1 comment
It would be interesting to do this with different delays to see how the noise level increases as the delay increases, then once you have a bunch of images recovered, make an…
yonatan8070 on HN
Questions
How to prevent cold boot attacks
From 1 comment
I'd never even heard of cold boot attacks. Is there any prevention of this?
alana314 on HN
Whether freezer cooling would give similar results
From 1 comment
What results would you expect to get if you simply put the whole setup in a regular freezer? Or if you just tried it during winter
yonatan8070 on HN
Alternatives named
Intel TME and AMD full memory encryption
From 2 comments
That is correct, AMD Zen4 (Ryzen 7000) supports transparent full memory encryption. It also supports more granular memory encryption, for example to prevent the host accessing VM…
dist-epoch on HNNice work. There is TME for intel, does anyone know its implementation state and if something similar exists for arm?…
badrabbit on HN
TCG firmware RAM wipe on boot
From 1 comment
This is mitigated by a Trusted Computing Group feature - at boot, the OS sets a non-volatile flag, and clears it again on clean shutdown after wiping any sensitive material from…
mjg59 on HN