Back to results
US 2003/0196100 A1Published application
Protection against memory attacks following reset
OwnerDavid W. Grawrock, David I. Poisner +1inventors
InventorsDavid W. Grawrock, David I. Poisner, James A. Sutton
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Methods, apparatus and computer readable medium are described that attempt to protect secrets from system reset attacks. In some embodiments, the memory is locked after a system reset and secrets removed from the memory before the memory is unlocked.
Claims35
A method comprising:
- locking a memory in response to determining that the memory might contain secrets;
- and
- writing to the locked memory to overwrite secrets the memory might contain.
A method comprising:
- locking a memory after a system reset event;
- removing data from the locked memory;
- and
- unlocking the memory after the data is removed from the memory.
1 more element
A token comprising:
- a non-volatile, write-once memory store that indicates that a memory has never contained secrets and that may be updated to indicate that the memory has contained secrets.
An apparatus comprising:
- a memory locked store to indicate whether a memory is locked;
- and
- a memory controller to deny untrusted accesses and permit trusted accesses to the memory in response to the memory locked store indicating that the memory is locked.
An apparatus comprising:
- a memory to store secrets;
- a memory locked store to indicate whether the memory is locked;
- a memory controller to deny untrusted accesses to the memory in response to the memory locked store indicating that the memory is locked;
- and
- a processor to update the memory locked store to lock the memory after a system reset in response to determining that the memory might contain secrets.
2 more elements
A computer readable medium comprising:
- instructions that in response to being executed after a system reset, result in a computing device;
- locking a memory based upon whether the memory might contain secrets;
- removing the secrets from the locked memory;
- and
- unlocking the memory after removing the secrets.
2 more elements
A method comprising:
- initiating a system startup process of a computing device;
- and
- clearing contents of a system memory of the computing device during the system startup process.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.