New cold boot attack affects “nearly all modern computers”

zdnet.com

9 pointsdsr125 comments

What’s the “new attack” here?

This seems like a rather standard cold boot attack.

I'm not in the security area, so I'm wondering the same.

From the article:

> like all previous cold boot attacks, their method requires physical access and a special tool to extract leftover RAM.

>But security researchers from Finnish cyber-security firm F-Secure discovered that they could disable this feature by modifying firmware settings and steal data from a computer's RAM after a cold reboot.

I guess this is supposed to be the "new" thing. This is really obvious though, so calling it a "new attack" seems a bit ridiculous.

The talk wasn't bad though.

They modify things to bypass the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) protection of overwriting the RAM when the power comes back, they also enable external booting, and: "Cold boot attacks can then be carried out by booting a special program off a USB stick."

Original source https://blog.f-secure.com/cold-boot-attacks/

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