Vulnerabilities
Cold Boot Attack
Also known as: DRAM remanence attack
Definition
A physical attack that recovers cryptographic keys and other secrets from RAM by rapidly powering off and re-reading the volatile memory before its contents fully decay.
Examples
- Princeton 2008 cold-boot extraction of BitLocker keys.
- F-Secure 2018 demonstration bypassing newer firmware memory overwrites.
Related terms
Side-Channel Attack
An attack that recovers secrets from a system by observing physical or implementation characteristics — timing, power, electromagnetic emissions, caches, acoustic signals — rather than logical flaws.
Memory Corruption
An umbrella term for vulnerabilities where a program writes outside the bounds of intended memory, undermining type-safety, control flow, or data integrity.
Cryptography
The science of securing information through mathematical techniques that provide confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation in the presence of adversaries.
Encryption
The cryptographic transformation of plaintext into ciphertext using an algorithm and key so that only authorized parties can recover the original data.
Vulnerability
A weakness in a system, application, or process that an attacker can exploit to violate confidentiality, integrity, or availability.
Rowhammer
A hardware vulnerability in DRAM where repeatedly activating one memory row causes bit flips in physically adjacent rows, undermining memory integrity.