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data persists in DRAM even without power

Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 11:11 pm
by Jonathan
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/21/re ... rypti.html

My own experiments in disabling DRAM refresh indicate that the machine can keep humming along for twenty seconds before a fatal error occurs without refreshing the DRAM at all. If you're willing to tolerate a high fault rate, several minutes sounds like a perfectly reasonable window to extract useful data from recently used DIMMs.

Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 5:12 am
by Jason
What would be a "safe" amount of time?

Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 6:09 pm
by Jonathan
http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/faq/

I certainly haven't attempted to defeat any security or encryption. I defer to the authors of the paper, who say several minutes in the powered off state should suffice.