On Sun, Nov 07, 2010 at 18:44:48 +0100,
Jan Kratochvil <jan.kratochvil(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:36:58 +0100, Vaclav Mocek wrote:
> I have read some articles about the Cold Boot Attacks and I am
> wondering whether my Fedora box is protected against such kinds of
> attack, at least to some extent.
If you have physical access to the box there is no security left. Attacked
can install there a trojan to catch+store boot password, install backdoor into
the booted kernel, use SMM (System Management Hook) etc. Attacker can also
solder in a sniffer of memory accesses. Other variants also exist.
Having the laptop stolen, modified, put back and then stolen again later,
may not be a threat he is concerned about.
His concern seems to be that shutting the machine down may not be good enough
to protect against the laptop simply being stolen.