Cyrillic Partners

Okay, the latest from the world of informational warfare is only a little off topic for an economics blog. But since encryption underlies every ecommerce transaction and all kinds of protected communications, anything that shakes that foundation is worth knowing about.

John Markoff, an awesome reporter for the NYT, writes about Princeton professor Ed Felton’s latest hack: physically freezing a computer’s DRAM to slow it down and make it spit out the encryption keys that should have only been momentarily stored there.

It’s not the sort of thing that a hacker could exploit from far away, you actually need to pop the computer open and spray the chip with air.

Physical hacks are becoming increasingly popular as computers become more portable. Laptops follow employees home from work or walk out the front door with thieves–often with reams of “private” data.

Now it will be even easier to swipe data from those computers. And unlike software, there’s no easy way to send out a “patch” for this exploit.

[Thanks to iit.edu for the pic]

Trackback URI | Comments RSS