Don Reisinger on Apple and Google

or, a Microsoft Fan-Bay tries to bash the competition.

BitLocker and how it’s Best Practices is Not Secure by Default

On February 21st, the security world got a cold splash of water on the face. That was the day that Edward Felton published a research paper, and a video was posted, titled Cold Boot Attacks on Disk Encryption. The basic premise is this:

• When a laptop that uses disk encryption is running, even in sleep mode and sometimes even in hibernate mode, the decryption keys are loaded in memory.
• Memory is not truly volatile, in that it can take up to 30 seconds for the memory to lose significant data, and much longer if the memory is chilled.
• It would be possible to bootup a laptop with a small program that can dump the contents of the not-yet-empty memory onto an external drive.
• An attacker can look through the memory dump for the decryption keys, and if those keys are found, they can decrypt the drive of the laptop.

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