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AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Police at the door? Hit the PANIC button to erase your RAM.

The Panic button is a new Python app called "Centry Panic" and was developed to mitigate cold boot and direct memory access attacks on Windows, Mac and Linux that could be used by forensics professionals to capture information from memory.

Cold boot attacks allow the fading contents of RAM to be preserved for reading after a target machine is shut down. Direct memory access side-channel attacks allow crypto keys to be yanked by attackers with access to the physical memory address space of a target machine. Both attacks work after a computer's chips are chilled by about ten degrees centigrade, as doing so noticeably delays memory fade on systems running DDR1 and DDR2, according to a paper http://www1.cs.fau.de/filepool/projects/coldboot/f ares_coldboot.pdf [cs.fau.de] (pdf) published last year on the feasibility of cold boot attacks. However the short window of time available to pull meaningful data in cold boot attacks coupled with the techniques failure to target DDR3 RAM raised doubts that the attacks were feasible. Academics said the lower voltage, higher integration density and resulting lower charges in DDR3 ram cells could explain the failure.

https://github.com/0xPoly/Centry [github.com]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/28/police_at_ the_door_hit_the_panic_button/ [theregister.co.uk]

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