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Canned Air Helped Beat Encrypted Hard Drives
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-06-30
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Sure the custom software had something to do with it, but some students at Princeton also found that compressed air enabled an unlikely crack.
 | | Canned Air Helped Beat Encrypted Hard Drives |  |
Laptop thefts and other security concerns led to the growth of the burgeoning computer security market, as concerned people sought ways to safeguard their data. Unfortunately some common solutions may be less than advertised.
Earlier this year, Popular Science noted the work at Princeton by student researchers into the viability of encryption software for protecting hard drives. They found a way to crack the software, but needed to exploit a piece of hardware first.
A DRAM chip contains the key used to access the otherwise encrypted hard drive. After turning off a computer, the data in the chip should disappear.
Rapidly cooling the chip with compressed air keeps the data from fading. From there, the researchers found it trivial to drop the DRAM chip into another computer and attack it with a code-cracking program.
"We have demonstrated practical attacks against several popular disk encryption systems: BitLocker (a feature of Windows Vista), FileVault (a feature of Mac OS X), dm-crypt (a feature of Linux), and TrueCrypt (a third-party application for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X)," the researchers said.
"Since these problems result from common design limitations of these systems rather than specific bugs, most similar disk encryption applications, including many running on servers, are probably also vulnerable."
Vendors had been advised before the public report of the issues discovered at Princeton. Currently the most effective way to mitigate such an attack is to power down a machine several minutes before it may be left where it could be physically compromised.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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