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Re:A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail by etherael on Sunday June 30, 2013 @02:33AM (#5964908)
Isn't the pure hardware method for memory snapshots some ridiculously complex mechanism with freezing the memory and quickly transferring it to a reading device?

If you're going to pull this, you need to know in advance that it's necessary, that's not some minor thing that everyone is going to just do automatically, it's an extra, complicated step it's easy to screw up.

That said, I acknowledge the possibility of compromise in the aforementioned scenario, but once again I don't understand people who always jump to the "I am vulnerable to this narrow threat model, ergo, I should not bother to protect myself against any threat models". Especially when the measures you can take to protect yourself most likely will address the actual threat models you are liable to encounter.

Re:A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail by mike-cardwell on Sunday June 30, 2013 @02:48PM (#5966718)
"ridiculously complex mechanism" ... Not really. Anyone with the ability to stick a USB stick in a USB port and hit a power reset button can pull off this attack:

http://www.mcgrewsecurity.com/tools/msramdmp/

Re:A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail by noinsight on Monday July 01, 2013 @05:31AM (#5969586)
Hmm, that requires USB booting though, if you disable that from the BIOS and password protect it, they can't really use this method. If they pull the battery the machine needs to be turned off and so the RAM will clear.
Re:A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail by etherael on Monday July 01, 2013 @06:02AM (#5969650)
You don't get BIOS access to low cost dedicated servers on OVH, even though they're dedicated, you can't KVM them.

mid to high range ones you can though so that might be a workable solution there.

Also, they can still rip the ram out and nitrogen it.

Re:A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail by etherael on Sunday June 30, 2013 @03:32PM (#5966870)
Interesting stuff. TRESOR might not be overkill after all.
Re:A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail by lloeki on Sunday June 30, 2013 @05:10AM (#5965185)
> Isn't the pure hardware method for memory snapshots some ridiculously complex mechanism with freezing the memory and quickly transferring it to a reading device?

With Virtual Private Servers, it's trivial to do the virtualized version of this through the hypervisor.

Re:A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail by etherael on Sunday June 30, 2013 @05:25AM (#5965215)
My original statement said "dedicated server". The response said; "virtual server attack, also works with pure hardware machines". The only version of this attack that is relevant to the original statement is one that works on a dedicated server, so re-stating that it's trivial to do this against a virtual private server isn't really adding anything to the conversation.