Fedora - Cold Boot Attack

[Digimer]

On 10-11-06 07:36 PM, Vaclav Mocek wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have read some articles about the Cold Boot Attacks and I am 
> wondering  whether my Fedora box is protected against such kinds of 
> attack, at least to some extent.
> 
> I work like an Embedded SW/HW Developer and my experience is that data 
> could remain in the dynamic memory for quite long time, even in the room 
> temperature. I have used it successfully for debugging, when a booting 
> routine after the cold reset copies some parts of memory to another 
> location which could be read lately.
> 
> It would be usefull to overwrite some parts of memory (keys etc.), 
> before the computer is switched off. So, my question is: Is there 
> already implemented and used some kind of protection?
> 
> Vaclav M.

It's a bit of a tangent, but I think Xen's dom0 kernel does this on
boot. If so, perhaps it's code can be adapted? I think it would be a
nice (optional?) feature, to be honest. Of course, this doesn't help if
power is suddenly cut, but combined with encrypted storage, it would
help remove another vector.

-- 
Digimer
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