4,391 Posts served

10,712 Conversations started

Use "Duster Spray Can" to hack the disk encryption keys

By Ajay Mungara (Intel) (111 posts) on February 28, 2008 at 11:37 am

Computer Scientists at Princeton University have shown some very easy and creative methods to hack cryptographic key material with physical access to an encrypted machine. Watch the video embedded below to find out how existing technology is really vulnerable against Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys.

All you need is a Duster spray can, if that, to cool the DRAM and extract the keys. The paper published along with the video clearly outlines techniques for finding keys residing in memory.The really cool part is that this technique doesn't really hack into the encryption directly. Rather, it depends on scanning the encryption keys by accessing the contents of the RAM and then extracting the data either by directly tampering with the RAM or by simply booting the computer from a USB drive. You can also read the industry response and more details on these findings in the news.com article.

It is not all bad news ... Intel is planning on releasing a technology code named “Danbury” which drastically reduces exposure to the Cold boot attacks. Danbury uses dedicated platform hardware to provide full disk encryption and the actual data encryption keys are not kept in the DRAM. Although, Intermediate, or ‘wrapping’, keys used to unlock data encryption keys are stored in DRAM temporarily, when the user is physically present or while remote IT operation has control of the platform. These keys are subsequently deleted once no longer needed, thus reducing the exposure significantly.

I am also very happy to announce that Danbury SDK that can leveraged by software vendors to enhance encryption software will be made on the manageability developer community later this year. If you are interested to find out more about this technology or are interested in developing encryption software using this technology then feel free to leave a comment on this post.

Categories: Manageability & Security, Site News & Announcements

For more complete information about compiler optimizations, see our Optimization Notice.

Comments (2)

March 24, 2008 7:33 AM PDT garry.mccracken@winmagic.com Total Points: 5 Registered User

I am interested in finding out more about Danbury.

March 24, 2008 10:35 AM PDT Ajay Mungara (Intel) Total Points: 7,924 Community Manager

Gary, Thanks for your interest in the Danbury technology. Here is an audio enabled presentation on Danbury from fall Intel Developer Forum: http://inteldeveloperforum.com.edgesuite.net/fall_2007/d2/SCIS003/index.html This presentation has more information related to Danbury technology. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks.

Trackbacks (0)

Leave a comment