• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.327-334
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• 2016

Contrary to the common belief, DRAM which is used for the main memory of various computing devices retains its content even though it is powered-off. Especially, the data-retaining time can increase if DRAM is cooled down. The Cold Boot Attack, a kind of side-channel attacks, tries to recover the sensitive information such as the cryptographic key from the powered-off DRAM. This paper proposes a new algorithm which recovers the AES key under the symmetric-decay cold-boot-attack model. In particular, the proposed algorithm uses the strategy of reducing the size of the candidate key space by testing the randomness of the extracted AES key bit stream.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.951-959
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• 2017

Under the assumption that there is available some additional information other than plaintext-ciphertext pairs, the security of the RSA cryptosystem has been analyzed by the attack methods such as the side-channel attacks and the lattice-based attacks. Recently, based on the data retention property of the powered-off DRAMs, the so called cold boot attack was proposed in the literature, which is focusing on recovering the various cryptosystems' key from some auxiliary information. This paper is dealing with the problem of recovering the RSA private key with erasures and errors and proposes a new key recovery algorithm which is shown to have better performance than the previous one introduced by Kunihiro et al.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.11-25
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• 2018

While being believed that decrypting any RSA ciphertext is as hard as factorizing the RSA modulus, it was also shown that, if additional information is available, breaking the RSA cryptosystem may be much easier than factoring. For example, Coppersmith showed that, given the 1/2 fraction of the least or the most significant bits of one of two RSA primes, one can factorize the RSA modulus very efficiently, using the lattice-based technique. More recently, introducing the so called cold boot attack, Halderman et al. showed that one can recover cryptographic keys from a decayed DRAM image. And, following up this result, Heninger and Shacham presented a polynomial-time attack which, given 0.27-fraction of the RSA private key of the form (p, q, d, $d_p$, $d_q$), can recover the whole key, provided that the given bits are uniformly distributed. And, based on the work of Heninger and Shacham, this paper presents a different approach for recovering RSA private key bits from decayed key information, under the assumption that some random portion of the private key bits is known. More precisely, we present the algorithm of recovering RSA private key bits from erased key material and elaborate the formula of describing the number of partially-recovered RSA private key candidates in terms of the given erasure rate. Then, the result is justified by some extensive experiments.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.9
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• pp.3068-3086
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• 2022

Digital Forensics is gaining popularity in adjudication of criminal cases as use of electronic gadgets in committing crime has risen. Traditional approach to collecting digital evidence falls short when the disk is encrypted. Encryption keys are often stored in RAM when computer is running. An approach to acquire forensic data from RAM when the computer is shut down is proposed. The approach requires that the investigator immediately cools the RAM and transplant it into a host computer provisioned with a tool developed based on cold boot concept to acquire the RAM image. Observation of data obtained from the acquired image compared to the data loaded into memory shows the RAM chips exhibit some level of remanence which allows their content to persist after shutdown which is contrary to accepted knowledge that RAM loses its content immediately there is power cut. Results from experimental setups conducted with three different RAM chips labeled System A, B and C showed at a reduced temperature of -25C, the content suffered decay of 2.125% in 240 seconds, 0.975% in 120 seconds and 1.225% in 300 seconds respectively. Whereas at operating temperature of 25℃, there was decay of 82.33% in 60 seconds, 80.31% in 60 seconds and 95.27% in 120 seconds respectively. The content of RAM suffered significant decay within two minutes without power supply at operating temperature while at a reduced temperature less than 5% decay was observed. The findings show data can be recovered for forensic evidence even if the culprit shuts down the computer.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2011.04a
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• pp.891-892
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• 2011

최근 많은 연구들은 RAM이 이전에 우리가 생각하는 것처럼 안전하지 않다는 것을 증명했다. RAM에는 암호화되지 않은 data가 저장되는데, RAM에 저장되어있는 데이터를 보호하기 위한 연구들이 진행되고 있다. 최근 cold boot attack이나 core dump exploitations은 과거 우리가 생각했던 것만큼 RAM이 안전하지 않다는 것을 증명하였다. 이런 유형의 공격으로부터 RAM을 보호하기 위한 방법으로 RAM의 암호화 방안을 제안한다.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2013.11a
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• pp.853-856
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• 2013

최근 클라우드 서비스가 발전함에 따라 향상된 자원 활용과 소프트웨어 이식성을 증가시키기 위한 하드웨어 가상화 기술 또한 성장하고 있다. 가상화의 특성상 이를 구동하고 관리하는 시스템 관리자가 메모리, 하드디스크 드라이브와 같은 컴퓨팅 리소스에 접근할 수 있다. 관리자에 의한 Cold-boot Attack이나 내부 명령어를 통해서 메모리 상의 데이터가 유출될 수 있으므로 개인정보와 기밀문서와 같은 민감한 데이터의 노출 위험이 발생한다. C. Li 등은 Guest OS의 가상 메모리 기본 단위인 페이지를 암호화하여 관리자에게 메모리 상의 데이터가 노출되지 않도록 막는 기법을 제안하였다. 하지만 페이지 암호화에 사용되는 키를 하이퍼바이저상에서 구하는 과정에서 키가 노출된다는 문제점이 발생한다. 본 논문에서는 내부자 공격에 안전한 가상 머신 프레임워크를 제안한다. IOMMU(Input/Output Memory Management Unit)를 사용하여 직접 하드웨어 디바이스에 접근 가능한 Guest OS를 생성하고 TPM(Trusted Platform Module) 가상화를 사용하여 시스템 관리자가 알 수 없도록 암호 키를 생성/관리한다. 하이퍼바이저는 이 암호 키를 사용하여 Guest OS의 페이지를 암호화한다. 이를 통해 관리자에게 키를 노출하지 않고 Guest OS 메모리 상의 데이터를 보호할 수 있다.