Security Through Amnesia: A Software-Based Solution to the Cold Boot Attack on Disk Encryption

Disk encryption has become an important security measure for a multitude of clients, including governments, corporations, activists, security-conscious professionals, and privacy-conscious individuals. Unfortunately, recent research has discovered an effective side channel attack against any disk mounted by a running machine\cite{princetonattack}. This attack, known as the cold boot attack, is effective against any mounted volume using state-of-the-art disk encryption, is relatively simple to perform for an attacker with even rudimentary technical knowledge and training, and is applicable to exactly the scenario against which disk encryption is primarily supposed to defend: an adversary with physical access. To our knowledge, no effective software-based countermeasure to this attack supporting multiple encryption keys has yet been articulated in the literature. Moreover, since no proposed solution has been implemented in publicly available software, all general-purpose machines using disk encryption remain vulnerable. We present Loop-Amnesia, a kernel-based disk encryption mechanism implementing a novel technique to eliminate vulnerability to the cold boot attack. We offer theoretical justification of Loop-Amnesia's invulnerability to the attack, verify that our implementation is not vulnerable in practice, and present measurements showing our impact on I/O accesses to the encrypted disk is limited to a slowdown of approximately 2x. Loop-Amnesia is written for x86-64, but our technique is applicable to other register-based architectures. We base our work on loop-AES, a state-of-the-art open source disk encryption package for Linux.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

An Exploratory Study into Open Source Platform Adoption

Research on open source software has focused mainly on the motivations of open source programmers and the organization of open source projects [17] [19]. Some researchers portray open source as an extension of the earlier open systems movement [36]. While there has been some research on open-systems software adoption by corporate MIS organizations [4] the issue of open source adoption has received little attention. We use a series of interviews with MIS managers to develop a grounded theory of open source platform adoption. We contrast this to prior academic and popular reports about the adoption of open source