[tahoe-dev] can the disk be used securely to manage your data? Re: Tahoe-LAFS is widely misunderstood

[Kyle Markley]

 On Fri, 4 Feb 2011 00:47:59 -0700, "Zooko O'Whielacronx" 
 <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:

> http://citp.princeton.edu/pub/coldboot.pdf

 Very interesting; thanks for this link.

> P.S. Once we've nailed this one then we can move on to the "cold boot
> attack" world in which RAM is also untrusted! (Tahoe-LAFS contributor
> Jacob Appelbaum was one of the authors of that attack.) It turns out
> to be theoretically possible to do useful work in that threat model,
> relying on the confidentiality of your registers but not your RAM.

 I'm skeptical.  Your registers could go to RAM at the first hardware 
 interrupt, outside of your control.  You'd need private registers 
 exclusively for your application that aren't part of the OS context 
 switch image.

-- 
 Kyle Markley