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Comment by nicce

5 hours ago

Anyone with physical access. I think it is understandable from the phrase.

There is a common misconception about how lock-screens in general work - they usually just prevents using the current hardware and software as it is to access the current OS. But the disk encryption is the main thing that prevents modification and other kind of access to actual data. And if the disk encryption key is lying in the memory, then effectively, the disk encryption is bypassed if someone can access the machine physically and assuming that there are no sufficient tampering protections in place for that machine.

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nicce

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acdha  5 hours ago

Anyone with physical access, significant tools, and experience. The FBI has people who can pull data out of memory after freezing the RAM but the average laptop thief doesn’t so how serious this is depends significantly on your threat model. If you’re not a major criminal, bitcoin whale, or intelligence target this is almost certainly academic.

  • deng  5 hours ago

    > If you’re not a major criminal, bitcoin whale, or intelligence target this is almost certainly academic.

    Thanks, that's what I thought.

  • bluebarbet  2 hours ago

    While that is true, the fact is that encryption is technically useless for anyone who is not constantly powering off and on, which is surely a bunch of people. That this is not widely understood is IMO a problem. And excellent reason for Debian's feature.

    PS: Downvoting is not a rebuttal. Disk encryption is not effective security on a suspended (sleeping) system. That is a fact.

    • acdha  39 minutes ago

      You’re being downvoted because you’re taking a narrow edge case and saying it invalidates all usage. Disk encryption is not “technically useless” when it works for 99.999+% of the people using it who aren’t targeted by professional attackers. Most people expect it to protect them against an unskilled thief or when they resell the device, and it works for that.

      People in those high risk categories already need more than disk encryption anyway, so this isn’t even the critical piece for them! (Consider how likely it is that I would have the resources and access to freeze and extract your RAM but not, say, the ability to record you entering your password using the same access. Yes, you can come up with scenarios where that makes a difference but it really underscores that you have many additional things to worry about if this is your threat model.)

deng  5 hours ago

> Anyone with physical access. I think it is understandable from the phrase.

Sorry, I'm probably dense, I still don't get it. You steal a laptop, you open it, the screen is locked with a password/fingerprint whatever. How do you read out the RAM from that laptop?