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Cold Boot Attack Tools for Linux

Issue 177

From Issue #177
January 2009

Jan 01, 2009  By Kyle Rankin
 in
Did you know that RAM doesn't clear the moment it loses power? That it can persist for up to a few minutes if chilled? Learn about attack techniques that take advantage of these facts to uncover encryption keys and break disk encryption.

Resources

Official Page for the Cold Boot Attack: citp.princeton.edu/memory

Direct Link to the Research Paper: citp.princeton.edu/pub/coldboot.pdf

Source Code for Cold Boot Attack Tools: citp.princeton.edu/memory/code

Kyle Rankin is a Senior Systems Administrator in the San Francisco Bay Area and the author of a number of books, including Knoppix Hacks and Ubuntu Hacks for O'Reilly Media. He is currently the president of the North Bay Linux Users' Group.

______________________

Kyle Rankin is a systems architect; and the author of DevOps Troubleshooting, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, Knoppix Hacks, Knoppix Pocket Reference, Linux Multimedia Hacks, and Ubuntu Hacks.

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Unbelievable. Always a

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 08/16/2010 - 08:58.

Unbelievable. Always a problem. Even the author's fix doesn't work. Gotta love the code monkeys who can't explain their own work. It's useless unless other people can benefit from it.

PXE files

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 07/23/2009 - 13:35.

There are two files under the "pxe" directory, "scrapper" and "scrapper.bin", i'm assuming one is kernel and the other is init image?

i had the same problem...

RowanH's picture
Submitted by RowanH (not verified) on Thu, 07/16/2009 - 06:20.

i had the same problem... apparently -fno-stack-protector-all is not a valid option on my machine.. no idea why and i really don't care that much so long as i can compile.

a quick workaround:-

use an older compiler alongside your existing setup- this is actually useful in many situations,
if your a debian-derivative, e.g. ubuntu:

apt-get install gcc-3.4

make CC=gcc-3.4

hope this is helpful to someone

A MindMap of Same

Mitch Frazier's picture
Submitted by Mitch Frazier on Mon, 06/01/2009 - 08:20.

For those of you that like mind maps: Cold Boot Mind Map

Mitch Frazier is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal.

compile

splashd's picture
Submitted by splashd on Sun, 12/21/2008 - 11:48.

I could not get the code to compile, even after correcting t he pxe/Makefile as the author outlined.

I still get the "__stack_chk_fail" message

reply

dm0n7's picture
Submitted by dm0n7 (not verified) on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 20:54.

add -fno-stack-protector to the Makefile in the following sub-directories: stand, pxe, and usb.

It should then compile.

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