Re:TRESOR Runs Encryption Securely Outside RAM
by tedunangst on Friday September 27, 2013 @11:48AM
(#6457574)
The plaintext of whatever you're encrypting. Presumably you're going to actually use these debug register AES keys to encrypt or decrypt something more interesting.
Re:TRESOR Runs Encryption Securely Outside RAM
by rdl on Friday September 27, 2013 @01:27PM
(#6458211)
The sneaky thing is to do like TreVisor, and I believe the commercial company PrivateCore, to encrypt all memory outside the CPU die (L1/L2, maybe L3?), by pinning the hypervisor and encryption routines to something running inside, and encrypting everything which leaves (and presumably doing some integrity protection). HN user sweis works for PrivateCore; I've talked to them a few times and they seem really interesting, although I think a more conventional HSM makes more sense for some applications, and Intel SGX is going to make the whole thing a lot more interesting in 2-3 years.
I just wanted to say that keeping the decryption keys out of RAM and Disks is not that paranoid because there are techniques which allow extraction of data from the RAM: cold boot, ordinary malware/rootkits, DMA malware.