Copker: A Cryptographic Engine Against Cold-Boot Attacks

Cryptosystems are essential for computer and communication security, e.g., RSA or ECDSA in PGP Email clients and AES in full disk encryption. In practice, the cryptographic keys are loaded and stored in RAM as plain-text, and therefore vulnerable to cold-boot attacks exploiting the remanence effect of RAM chips to directly read memory data. To tackle this problem, we propose Copker, a cryptographic engine that implements asymmetric cryptosystems entirely within the CPU, without storing any plain-text sensitive data in RAM. Copker supports the popular asymmetric cryptosystems (i.e., RSA and ECDSA), and deterministic random bit generators (DRBGs) used in ECDSA signing. In its active mode, Copker stores kilobytes of sensitive data, including the private key, the DRBG seed and intermediate states, only in on-chip CPU caches (and registers). Decryption/signing operations are performed without storing any sensitive information in RAM. In the suspend mode, Copker stores symmetrically-encrypted private keys and DRBG seeds in memory, while employs existing solutions to keep the key-encryption key securely in CPU registers. Hence, Copker releases the system resources in the suspend mode. We implement Copker with the support of multiple private keys. With security analyses and intensive experiments, we demonstrate that Copker provides cryptographic services that are secure against cold-boot attacks and introduce reasonable overhead.