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Article

Title: An Incidental Security Benefit

Author: Naraine, Ryan Article Type: Product Comparison
Source: eWeek, v25 n7 p20(1) Publication Date: Mar 3, 2008
  ISSN: 1530-6283
  Illustrations: Photographs
URL of Publication: http://www.eweek.com

MacBook Air users loathe the fact that it's impossible to upgrade the systems random access memory (RAM). However, this state-of-the-art technology can ultimately be used as a failsafe security feature. MIT's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project director of security architecture states that the MacBook Air is very close to being the only mainstream market laptop immune to cold-boot encryption attacks. In February 2008, researchers from Princeton University and the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported a design limitation in some widely-used disk encryption technologies that enable practical attacks against sleeping or hibernating laptops. The design limitation is affecting Microsoft's BitLocker (Windows Vista OS), Apple's FileVault (Mac OS X) and Linux's TrueCrypt and dm-crypt. In their attack scenario, the researchers found that most computers' RAM contents survive for about seven to sixty seconds even at room temperature. RAM contents can also survive a long time after physical removal of memory chips from a computer, if sprayed and cooled with a cheap refrigerant like canned air spray dusters. The researchers used tools and programs they made themselves to take the content out of memory after the computers were re-booted, by-passing the disk encryption technology. OLPC's director said that Apple soldered MacBook Air's double data rate 2 (DDR2) synchronous dynamic RAM (SDRAM) directly onto the motherboard. The result is high or total resistance to a cold-boot encryption attack. If Apple releases an Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) update for MacBook Air which 'zero-izes' RAM contents at every start-up, the laptop could become the only or first mainstream computing device that features full-disk encryption highly resistant to Princeton's attack scenario.

Special Features: Photographs

Companies:
Apple Inc Electronic Frontier Foundation
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Microsoft Corp
Princeton University

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