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by JoachimSchipper 5493 days ago
"Sleeping" laptops get stolen too; this might slightly help. That said, this is a cool hack, not the greatest protection ever.

Full-disk encryption (on a machine turned off at the time) is, I believe, typically considered sufficient protection. Consult a lawyer in your local jurisdiction, though.
1 comments
gst 5493 days ago
That's my main reason for using suspend-to-disk instead of suspend-to-ram.

With suspend-to-disk Linux allows me to save the RAM image to the encrypted harddisk. With suspend-to-ram it would be pretty easy to work around the encryption.

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tptacek 5493 days ago
Right, but suspend-to-disk doesn't really mitigate cold boot attacks, because in order to suspend your data to disk, an AES key is loaded into DRAM. The "cold" in "cold boot" refers to the tricks researchers use to extract data from DRAM even after reboot.

The point of this research is that there aren't (that we know of) "cold register" attacks that extract prior contents of CPU registers.

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gst 5493 days ago
Right, cold boot attacks would also apply to suspend-to-disk. But currently I do not really worry about this scenario, as it seems that cold boot attacks are only feasible if you get access to the hardware within several minutes after it has been powered down.
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tptacek 5493 days ago
Sure. If you don't care about cold-boot attacks, you don't care about this research. I think it's interesting, but it doesn't keep me up at night.
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gst 5493 days ago
Offtopic: Btw, does someone know why the "reply" links are missing on some posts (such as the parent post)? Is this a bug? At least it works when "manually" opening the respective URL for a reply.
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tptacek 5493 days ago
There is a deliberate delay on replies in deeply-nested threads, as a damper on flame wars.
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JoachimSchipper 5493 days ago
You can still reply via the 'link' button, though.
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