From: Andrew Loewenstern <andrew_loewenstern@il.us.swissbank.com>
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 95 09:45:12 PDT
To: hallam@w3.org
Subject: Re: Emergency File Wipe Algorithim
Message-ID: <9509051644.AA00586@ch1d157nwk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Peter Gutmann writes in an article quoted by Christian Wettergren
>  The greater the amount of time that new data has existed in the
>  cell, the more the old stress is "diluted", and the less reliable
>  the information extraction will be.  Generally, the rates of change
>  due to stress and relaxation are in the same order of magnitude.
>  Thus, a few microseconds of storing the opposite data to the
   ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 	
>  currently stored value will have little effect on the oxide.
   ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 	

Phill Hallam writes:
>  If the power is cycled as opposed to turned off only then a memory
>  self test program will probably erase the data.

Assuming Peter Gutmann is correct, a memory test program "probably" won't do much.

Of course, you data must be worth quite a pretty penny for an attacker to  
attempt to recover data from the oxides on the cells in your RAM.


andrew