Protecting Suspended Devices from Memory Attacks
Today's computing devices keep considerable amounts of sensitive data unencrypted in RAM. When stolen, lost or simply unattended, attackers are capable of accessing the data in RAM with ease. Valuable and possibly classified data falling into the wrongs hands can lead to severe consequences, for instance when disclosed or reused to log in to accounts or to make transactions. We present a lightweight and hardware-independent mechanism to protect confidential data on suspended Linux devices against physical attackers. Our mechanism rapidly encrypts the contents of RAM during suspension and thereby prevents attackers from retrieving confidential data from the device. Existing systems can easily be extended with our mechanism while fully preserving the usability for end users.
Protecting Suspended Devices from Memory Attacks
EuroSec'17 Proceedings of the 10th European Workshop on Systems Security
| Authors: | Manuel Huber, Julian Horsch, and Sascha Wessel |
| Year/month: | 2017/4 |
| Booktitle: | EuroSec'17 Proceedings of the 10th European Workshop on Systems Security |
| Pages: | 10:1–10:6 |
| Address: | Belgrade, Serbia |
| Publisher: | ACM |
| Fulltext: | click here |
Abstract |
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| Today's computing devices keep considerable amounts of sensitive data unencrypted in RAM. When stolen, lost or simply unattended, attackers are capable of accessing the data in RAM with ease. Valuable and possibly classified data falling into the wrongs hands can lead to severe consequences, for instance when disclosed or reused to log in to accounts or to make transactions. We present a lightweight and hardware-independent mechanism to protect confidential data on suspended Linux devices against physical attackers. Our mechanism rapidly encrypts the contents of RAM during suspension and thereby prevents attackers from retrieving confidential data from the device. Existing systems can easily be extended with our mechanism while fully preserving the usability for end users. | |
Bibtex:
@inproceedings { Huber:2017:PSD:3065913.3065914,author = { Manuel Huber and Julian Horsch and Sascha Wessel},
title = { Protecting Suspended Devices from Memory Attacks },
year = { 2017 },
month = { April },
booktitle = { EuroSec'17 Proceedings of the 10th European Workshop on Systems Security },
address = { Belgrade, Serbia },
pages = { 10:1–10:6 },
publisher = { ACM },
url = { http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3065913.3065914 },
}