Usually a cold boot attack involves cooling memory chips or quickly restarting the computer, and exploiting the fact that data is not immediately lost ( or not lost if power is very quickly restored ) and the data that was held at the point of intervention will be left accessible to examination.
42.
A study found data remanence in DRAM with data retention of seconds to minutes at room temperature and " a full week without refresh when cooled with liquid nitrogen . " The study authors were able to use a cold boot attack to recover cryptographic BitLocker, Apple FileVault, dm-crypt for Linux, and TrueCrypt.
43.
Ok I just installed a SMART, and without the clicking happening the first thing it noticed is that after a cold boot the HD temp quickly rose to 47 deg C . The SMART tool by default sets off an alarm at anything over 42 deg C . Any processing beyond simple web browsing brought the temperature up by a couple more degrees.
44.
Nevertheless, in February 2008, a group of security researchers published details of a so-called " cold boot attack " that allows full disk encryption systems such as BitLocker to be compromised by booting the machine off removable media, such as a USB drive, into another operating system, then retains information for up to several minutes ( or even longer if cooled ) after power has been removed.
