Cold bits as a security bypass

摘要

Network World's headline was certainly designed to catch a security person's eye:"Disk encryption easily cracked, researchers find." In most cases, however, the risk is less than the headline implies. It turns out that some Princeton University researchers followed up on earlier research showing that modern computer memories retained their contents even with the power off (known as memory rema-nence), and that the retention time could be lengthened by cooling the memory.