Security News > 2023 > June > Robot can rip the data out of RAM chips with chilling technology

Cold boot attacks, in which memory chips can be chilled and data including encryption keys plundered, were demonstrated way back in 2008 - but they just got automated.

The presentation focuses on a Cryo-Mechanical RAM Content Extraction Robot that Cui and colleagues Grant Skipper and Yuanzhe Wu developed to collect decrypted data from DDR3 memory modules.

"Then we pull the physical memory off of the device when we want to read the content of the physical RAM - we slam it into our little FPGA fixture. It's basically just reading physical memory by grabbing it from the device and then putting it physically into the reader. And it has actually worked surprisingly well," Cui explained.

The original cold boot attack, Cui said, involved freezing a laptop's memory by inverting a can of compressed air to chill the computer's DRAM. When memory chips can be brought down to around -50°C, the data represented within can be temporarily frozen - so that it persists for several minutes, even when powered down.

"So once we got one memory chip pulling off reliably and then reading correctly, we had to do not one but five chips, because they're all interlaced together. And then three of the chips are on one side of the board, and two of them are on the bottom of the board. So we had to come up with a way to somehow magically either pull all five memory chips off at literally the same instruction - which is, you know, hilariously complicated and it's just not really doable."

The flexibility of the socket made it possible to have a piston push the memory chips into place with cheap hardware, without damaging the circuit board or memory chips.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/cold_boot_ram_theft/