A Study for Protecting Cold Boot Attacks

Abstract

This paper proposes four different methods for preventing cold boot attacks. These attacks exploit DRAM remanence to acquire private information stored in a memory. DRAM modules can keep stored values for many seconds without a power supply, in particular at low temperature. To address cold boot attacks, circuit-shorting method, SRAM preservation method, and cell selection method are proposed. The integrated method of these methods is also proposed because these methods are independent and can be achieved together. These proposed methods are evaluated by using actual testbeds.