Forum Moderators: open
If you think that encrypting your laptop's hard drive will keep your data safe from prying eyes, you may want to think again, according to researchers at Princeton University.They'vediscovereda way to steal the hard drive encryption key used by products such as Windows Vista's BitLocker or Apple's FileVault. With that key, hackers could get access to all of the data stored on an encrypted hard drive.
That's because of a physical property of the computer's memory chips. Data in these DRAM (dynamic RAM) processors disappears when the computer is turned off, but it turns out that this doesn't happen right away, according to Alex Halderman, a Princeton graduate student who worked on the paper.
Encrypting Your Laptop HD May Not Protect Your Data [washingtonpost.com]
An interesting piece of research which makes you think hard about limiting access to your laptop.
The level of skill required is way beyond your average joe. It also assumes that the encryption key is stored directly in memory. Now I can easily believe that to be true of Microsoft's BitLocker, but I doubt it is true of all encryption systems and I would expect hardware solutions to be almost entirely immune from this sort of attack.
A far greater risk is badly configured encryption software that does not dismount encrypted volumes on standby, so a laptop stolen on standby would still be wide open even if encrypted.
Kaled.
Here's an interesting story showing how one guy obtained the key from Apple's FileVault using the techniques described in the article: How to bypass FileVault, BitLocker security [news.com]
