The DOI matches its Crossref record; 18 of the 18 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Lest we remember: cold-boot attacks on encryption keys
Abstract
Contrary to widespread assumption, dynamic RAM (DRAM), the main memory in most modern computers, retains its contents for several seconds after power is lost, even at room temperature and even if removed from a motherboard. Although DRAM becomes less reliable when it is not refreshed, it is not immediately erased, and its contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images. We show that this phenomenon limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access to a machine. It poses a particular threat to laptop users who rely on disk encryption: we demonstrate that it could be used to compromise several popular disk encryption products without the need for any special devices or materials. We experimentally characterize the extent and predictability of memory retention and report that remanence times can be increased dramatically with simple cooling techniques. We offer new algorithms for finding cryptographic keys in memory images and for correcting errors caused by bit decay. Though we discuss several strategies for mitigating these risks, we know of no simple remedy that would eliminate them.
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Cites
Small Solutions to Polynomial Equations, and Low Exponent RSA Vulnerabilities
Coppersmith, D. (1997) · Journal of Cryptology · doi:10.1007/s001459900030 · Cited by 771
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Thekkath, D. L. C., Mitchell, M., Lincoln, P., Boneh, D., Mitchell, J., & Horowitz, M. (2000) · ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News · doi:10.1145/378995.379237 · Cited by 597
A secure and reliable bootstrap architecture
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Liskov, M., Rivest, R. L., & Wagner, D. (2002) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/3-540-45708-9_3 · Cited by 468
Efficient Instantiations of Tweakable Blockciphers and Refinements to Modes OCB and PMAC
Rogaway, P. (2004) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-540-30539-2_2 · Cited by 410
Secure deletion of data from magnetic and solid-state memory
Gutmann, P. (1996) · Cited by 381
Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems
Anderson, R. (2020) · doi:10.1002/9781119644682 · Cited by 345
Building the IBM 4758 secure coprocessor
Dyer, J. G., Lindemann, M., Perez, R., Sailer, R., van Doorn, L., & Smith, S. W. (2001) · Computer · doi:10.1109/2.955100 · Cited by 282
Exposure-Resilient Functions and All-or-Nothing Transforms
Canetti, R., Dodis, Y., Halevi, S., Kushilevitz, E., & Sahai, A. (2000) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/3-540-45539-6_33 · Cited by 191
Using memory errors to attack a virtual machine
Govindavajhala, S., & Appel, A. W. (2004) · Proceedings 19th International Conference on Data Engineering (Cat. No.03CH37405) · doi:10.1109/secpri.2003.1199334 · Cited by 191
Cited by
Public-Key Cryptosystems Resilient to Key Leakage
Naor, M., & Segev, G. (2009) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-03356-8_2 · Cited by 403
Using innovative instructions to create trustworthy software solutions
Hoekstra, M., Lal, R., Pappachan, P., Phegade, V., & Del Cuvillo, J. (2013) · Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy · doi:10.1145/2487726.2488370 · Cited by 347
Robotics cyber security: vulnerabilities, attacks, countermeasures, and recommendations
Yaacoub, J.-P. A., Noura, H. N., Salman, O., & Chehab, A. (2022) · International Journal of Information Security · doi:10.1007/s10207-021-00545-8 · Cited by 320
A comparison study of intel SGX and AMD memory encryption technology
Mofrad, S., Zhang, F., Lu, S., & Shi, W. (2018) · Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy · doi:10.1145/3214292.3214301 · Cited by 102
Robust hardware true random number generators using DRAM remanence effects
Tehranipoor, F., Yan, W., & Chandy, J. A. (2016) · 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) · doi:10.1109/hst.2016.7495561 · Cited by 54
Metadata
- Authors
- Halderman, J. A., Schoen, S. D., Heninger, N., Clarkson, W., Paul, W., Calandrino, J. A., Feldman, A. J., Appelbaum, J., & Felten, E. W.
- Venue
- Communications of the ACM
- Published
- 2009-05
- Volume
- 52
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 91-98
- ISSN
- 0001-0782 (ISSN-L)
- 1557-7317
- OpenAlex
- W2175377689
- Cited by
- 980
- References
- 18
- FWCI
- 68.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Lest we remember: cold-boot attacks on encryption keys. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/1506409.1506429
- The paper
- Halderman, J. A., Schoen, S. D., Heninger, N., Clarkson, W., Paul, W., Calandrino, J. A., Feldman, A. J., Appelbaum, J., & Felten, E. W. (2009). Lest we remember: cold-boot attacks on encryption keys. Communications of the ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1506409.1506429
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
